Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Anthony Metivier on Uber Atheism, Consciousness, Increasing Memory, Understanding Žižek, and Depression

Starting point is 00:00:00 Anthony Metivier is a memory expert who's had a troubled life and through the odds managed to change his blighted scenario into a salubrious philosophical framework regarding consciousness, meditation, and memory based on what he calls oneness. What separates Anthony from other memory trainers is that he doesn't focus on long strings of digits for memorization or training for championships, but instead for memorizing information that actually improves your daily life. Anthony responds to emails fairly quickly and with length. You can find out more about him at magneticmemorymethod.com. Links to all that's referenced in the podcast is in the description. If you'd like to hear more conversations like this, then please consider supporting at patreon.com slash kurtjimungle. I've also recently opened up a crypto address, which means if you'd like to facilitate my foray into crypto and donate any amount whatsoever, then please do so. It seems

Starting point is 00:00:52 like the value of most of these currencies tend to be on the increase, and I'm willing to hold on to whatever's given in order to find out how far that trend will go. PayPal is also an option and is linked below as well. Thank you so much and enjoy. focused exclusively on you. So the people who are watching, who are listening, who want to chat, if I'm not responding to you, that's a good sign because it means that I'm here in the moment in the podcast, and that's probably a better viewing experience. The negative is that I don't get to your question in real time. Well, that's the question though, is anything off to the side, not in the moment? I had a professor actually who said that the center is always the margin and the margin is always the center. So he was referring to like pop culture with Madonna and all this sort of stuff. Like anything that Madonna is popularizing is always coming from the margin that somehow then

Starting point is 00:01:59 seems to be in the center. And then as soon as it gets too popular, then people want to push it back to the margin and somehow call it fringe. But in any case, it's all in consciousness, I would say. Not a memory champion, though. I only ever had one competition. And in that competition, I came second. So, but nonetheless. Although, you know, I did get what is called the warrior of the mind emblem for outstanding contributions to global mental literacy from Tony Buzan, who created the World Memory Championships. So that is its own triumph, so to speak. Great, great, great, great. If you see me frantic, Anthony, or anyone who's watching, it's because I just came from,

Starting point is 00:02:53 this is my fourth podcast for the day, my last one, so don't worry, I'm here with you for as long as you're willing to spend some time with me. And I also don't have the question, see, most of the time what I do is a prodigious amount of research. And it's as if I'm on a boat and I'm heavily steering it. For this one, I have notes, not printed in front of me like usual,

Starting point is 00:03:17 which means I'll have to press Alt-Tab and check my notes occasionally. But I thought that in the spirit of what you're about which is how about we float freely in the waters let the universe take us where it may i thought how about let this conversation take us where it may please do or please allow it anthony why don't you tell the audience a little bit about where you started from in your intellectual journey? So that's maybe you're around teenager, late teens or so. What your ideological, I don't like to use that word ideology, but for the sake of using a word that people believe they understand, your ideological disposition at the time and then how it changed and where you are now.

Starting point is 00:04:04 ideological disposition at the time and then how it changed and where you are now. Okay. Well, I don't normally talk about the teenage years, but I was pretty much a depressed, poetic kind of musician kid who skipped school as much as possible to smoke weed and drink beer and play with my band and write angry lyrics for the singer to sing. And my earliest experiences really were of being a, just dropping out of high school and reading the encyclopedia. I didn't read it page for page, but we had this old Collier's encyclopedia. And I, yeah. And I just went through that from beginning to end, you end. Again, not every single page, but it was just the most amazing experience. And I used to walk to pretend that I was going to school and listen to CBC radio. Peter Sosky was alive at the time.

Starting point is 00:04:57 I think it was Morningside it was called. And you were in Toronto or you were where? This is in British Columbia. So I was in Salmon salmon arm which is some nowhere place yeah if you see me go like this that's because for the people listening or watching this there's a bit of a delay because anthony's in australia if i'm correct yes right and i'm in toronto and so if i need to get a all of this gets edited out eventually when i put up the pristine version of this podcast but for now it's going to be messy and i forgot to ask you to record your

Starting point is 00:05:33 audio if you don't mind doing so it's recording okay great great just your own audio your instructions yes yeah thank you man thank you and i'm sorry to rudely interrupt if you don't mind continuing no not at all yeah so i wasn't in Toronto yet, but I was in Salmon Arm, even Silver Creek, which is outside of Salmon Arm, this very nowhere place. And listening to Peter Zosky, and he would bring in the most amazing guests that gave me far more of an education than high school ever did. And what ended up happening is I went to graduate with my friends, even though I wasn't graduating. And one of my friend's mothers who had inspired me so much

Starting point is 00:06:12 when I was a teenager, going to her house and seeing all the books that she had, she was a professor at York actually. She said, what the hell, you're not graduating? You should be a professor when you grow up. And somehow that got in my head, this image of being the professor. And, you know, it's kind of sucked not going to school and knowing that I was going to have a life of no education, because at that time, I think it was

Starting point is 00:06:36 true that if you didn't have your high school degree, you know, it would be very difficult to get a job. And so I took the embarrassing step of going back to high school. And then I got myself into university. And I mean, it's a long story, the university, but in terms of ideology, I don't know that I distinctly remember what it was, but I started university in political science that was going to be my focus and I was working for the the school newspaper editing writing stories and so forth and I met I think his name was Glenn Campbell not Glenn Campbell that doesn't sound right Glenn Clark maybe and he had been the premier of BC at the time and I interviewed him and I thought within three minutes, I never want anything to do with political science again or politicians. And so I went and changed my degree to English literature.

Starting point is 00:07:32 Why? What was it about politics? I just could tell he this kind of dual track modulating of what's going on. And it just felt so false to me. And I thought, this guy's a tyrant. And if I remember that word coming up to it, and I'd been reading, you know, Plato's Republic and all this sort of stuff at that time. It was just the first time encountering all those ideas. And I just thought, if I go that route, I will be like this guy. And so I wanted to get as far away from that as possible.

Starting point is 00:08:14 So that was where that puts me ideologically. I don't know, but I had been reading lots of existentialist literature and philosophy and was really into people like Don DeLillo in literature, whatever that means in terms of an ideology. But it seems quite embracing of a lot of different chaotic elements going on in the world and not getting too involved in any of them. So you can have the widest possible perspective and make decisions based on some sort of rational basis wherever possible. Were you a quick reader?

Starting point is 00:08:58 Yeah, I'd say I'm relatively quick, but slow enough to pay attention. Okay, so then what happened? So you were in your university years early. I know that it took you quite some time to getting your PhD, and that was because of quite a bit of itinerancy in your choices to what you precisely want. But why don't you continue through that route? Yeah, well, I started university in British Columbia at a small college in Salmon Arm, which is Okanagan University College, which I think now is subsumed by UBC. And then I was in University of Northern British Columbia, which is way up in Prince George.

Starting point is 00:09:42 University of Northern British Columbia, which is way up in Prince George. Somehow an uncle of mine had said, why don't you come work the summer at Para Paints, which is in Brampton in Toronto. And I did that and I kind of liked it there. And I wound up applying to University of Toronto. University of Toronto accepted me, but only on a part-time basis. And I didn't want to go to university part-time I don't know why it had something to do with like I had really bad high school grades because that's interesting yeah I dropped out and I mean I I never cared about high school at all I remember one time I had an A on my report card and I tore it up I was embarrassed that I had a good grade uh which was in literature of course why I think it was probably dramatic showing off at grade, which was in literature, of course. Why?

Starting point is 00:10:30 I think it was probably dramatic showing off at the time. I was in front of my friends in the band, and we were sharing each other's report cards, and they all had bad grades. And I heard I had this A, and they're like, what are you doing? Or whatever. But I remember touring it up as a sort of theatrical thing to do. So you had this romanticization of what it means to be this nihilist rock person yeah i mean it it was 1993 well i graduated uh i was supposed to graduate 95 so i graduated 96 but somewhere in 93 94 this is when i got this grade it It was like Nine Inch Nails, pretty hate machine, hate everybody, hate yourself, hate success.

Starting point is 00:11:09 And all the bands I followed, if they weren't bootstrapped, fugazi kind of indie, do-it-yourself people, then they were somehow anti-establishment or at least they were preaching that. Later you investigate this and there's a lot more corporate interest in it than you thought at the time. You you know what i noticed about you mentioned when you were

Starting point is 00:11:29 interviewing someone i forget the person's name glenn maybe it was some political science person and then you realized they had this pretext or a facade and you didn't want anything to do with that what i noticed is there are these artists nowadays ever since Kurt Cobain but Kurt Cobain was genuine if you watch Kurt Cobain he's authentic in his distaste for culture and his distaste for values of a certain kind he was a nihilist in some ways he was there's this romanticization of nihilists in pop culture in popular music that has grown ever since kurt cobain you even see it with artists nowadays with i don't remember who but you just look at the music videos and you see how they're singing like like like they're trying not to sing like they're trying to appear like

Starting point is 00:12:17 they're not trying yeah and i see it as false nihilism. I see it as a facade as well, because they're admiring what it's like to be a nihilist, or more particularly, they admire what being a nihilist, a popular nihilist, gets you. Someone like, I don't know this person named Dua Lipa or Lipa Duo. People in the comment section can correct me. I'm not familiar with modern music. But that's something I see. It's not just politicians that have this masquerading it's it's all of us it's me it's something i was i saw on a as i was watching an interview with

Starting point is 00:12:52 someone named chris williamson i'm pretty sure some he's a has a famous a fairly famous podcast he was interviewing someone who i forget her name pamela or has two p's whatever it doesn't matter she studies high performers right when you watch her speak you get the sense that you're not speaking to the person when i'm speaking to you right now i get the sense that i am speaking to you that you're being genuine you can tell because someone trips over their words someone is pausing as they think someone is like yourself someone is laughing at at different moments in their own story. Someone is hiding and recoiling from the parts that they're embarrassed about subconsciously rather than a manufactured appearance.

Starting point is 00:13:36 And when I was watching Chris interview her, let me get her name, not to berate her, but she has the same quality quality even though she is completely apolitical as far as i could see she's the same quality of politicians and i dislike that yeah that's another reason why i'm speaking to you completely off the cuff sorry not completely off the cuff i do have some notes but why i've made one page of notes rather than 10 pages compared to the usual guest, because I wanted to freely float in this stream of uncertainty with you. Let me get that person's name just so I can move on. Yeah. Well, I'll just say that that pretense is deeply alarming,

Starting point is 00:14:21 and I think it's deeply alarming to culture as such, even if people don't realize it. Deeply alarming. And I think it's deeply alarming to culture as such, even if people don't realize it. You see it in our productions all the time. But since you mentioned Cobain, I mean, he gave one of the greatest gifts in one of his interviews where he was just being himself and they're asking him what he reads and he said that he read patrick suskin's perfume which is a novel that's very much about this you know this crazy person who can't stand the stench of things and aha perfume right right right that's interesting which is a highly interesting novel to read and it's a very good novel. And this is where I think the question gets super interesting because here's Cobain who, you know, where is he?

Starting point is 00:15:14 Is he a nihilist? Is he pop culture? Is he anti-pop culture? What is this sort of thing? And he's reading a deeply cultured German novel, translated in English, I would assume. a deeply cultured German novel, translated in English, I would assume. But, you know, Suskind is not a lightweight or, you know, some vagabond novelist, right?

Starting point is 00:15:33 Turns out he's highly cherished and, you know, top notch, blue ribbon in Europe, etc. And you can really see the collapse, I think, in a lot of this sort of pretense. I don't know exactly what I'm trying to get to, but one thing that comes to mind is when I was a kid in Kamloops, British Columbia, we were between Seattle and Calgary, basically, or Vancouver and Calgary. But, you know, a lot of bands came through and they would stop. And one of them was green day and when we saw green day as kids this was the most amazing thing ever and we had no idea that

Starting point is 00:16:13 one day they were going to do this album called dookie and become this international smash hit we had no idea it was just some band called green day a couple of the kids had the shirt we all remembered because the drummer had bounced his sticks off the floor tom and was doing all these stunts and it just was the most memorable concert i think they played with roll cage which was a local band etc years later everybody's like oh they sold out but we saw them when they were real and all this sort of stuff and my question at that time was well and i'm you know what is real you know we call the sky blue but it's not really blue and i'm already a philosophical sort of oriented individual and i it rubbed me the wrong way that people would say we saw these guys when they were real but now that they have massive

Starting point is 00:17:03 radio play and they're on you know the music video all the time, now that's somehow not real. And later, if I skip forward to university in Toronto, I loved the poetry scene there. Scream in High Park was the most amazing thing to go to during those years. And seeing guys like Steve McCaffrey and Christian Book doing poetry readings and whatnot in Toronto. You'd always hear these people talking about how that they were masters of the craft. And then they would, with their creative writing salaries, berate people like Stephen King as garbage.

Starting point is 00:17:47 Because he was successful. Yeah. And I came up with this theory called craft and it was spelled C-R-A-P-H-T, right? And it's like crap. They're just calling all of this successful stuff crap because it succeeds. And then you look at Stephen King and he has this amazing quote somewhere. He's like, if you've ever sold a piece of writing and then taken that money and used it to pay the electricity bill, then I call you talented. And so there's like this war going on, but you know, who is it that's, that's doing the complaining in this war and so forth? And it's usually some sort of

Starting point is 00:18:25 Nietzschean slave morality where this or that is less real, or this or that is less genuine, or this or that is less authentic. And when you listen to the people who are making these claims, I'm not saying that this is always the case, but it seems usually to be coming from people who have some sort of invested interest in creating a symbolic suffering right now for these people to vent their hatred or their anger or their jealousy or their envy or whatever it is and that's like that's the deep sickness here uh that that i see in all these sorts of issues because if there's no free will, and if life is as chaotic as it appears to be, these people who become successful don't have nearly as much choice

Starting point is 00:19:11 in it as it seems. And it's, it's not as if they could have said, I'm going to be successful one day, I'm going to sell out. That's my plan. It just doesn't make any sense. And our filters now somehow call it garbage because it's successful. Well, where does that filter come from? What's the survival mechanism here? Anyway, that's kind of just riffing on you mentioning Kurt Cobain, but it's almost like a lot of these people get into this success and they themselves hate it, you know know because they didn't choose it they didn't want it and um that was certainly true of kurt cobain he couldn't bear his own success but there are other people i think who balance it quite health with quite a bit of health you know they managed to see the game for what it is and And they're like, yeah, you know, inflation is real and I better

Starting point is 00:20:05 make some investments and, you know, build a boat around myself as much as possible because the success isn't going to last, but I like the comfort I have now and so forth. And you just see all kinds of people playing all kinds of games and some play it well, some play it less well, some play it with an artist ideology, others play it with some other thing, but they got to play. You're forced to play it. And I don't know. I've always found that interesting anyway. So pretense, I think that there's pretension in all kinds of areas and it may have some biological filter. It may have some nature nurture complex going on, but I don't think it's as simple as, you know, nihilism in Kurt Cobain's case. Maybe, but I think it's, I think that the issues are

Starting point is 00:20:54 pretty, pretty deep and rich to sift and sort and screen through. There's a certain kind of speech that politicians definitely have something that even though I'll get excoriated for mentioning this, something that Donald Trump doesn't have, because Donald Trump speaks off the cuff, and you can tell as much as people dislike him and as much as whatever he says can be abhorrent, at least you get the feeling that he's, you know, I'll get critiqued for this as well.

Starting point is 00:21:20 I wouldn't even say that he's speaking from the heart because there is plenty of what he says that is opportunistic and manipulative as well i wouldn't even say that he's speaking from the heart because there is a there's plenty of what he says that is opportunistic and and manipulative as well but there's a different kind of speech that trump has than someone like kamala harris kamala harris now i'm not getting political i don't care about the politics right now i'm merely i'm merely stating that the feeling that you got from interviewing that politician and then saying, I don't want to be like that. That isn't just in politicians. Now, I managed to get the lady's name and I don't mean to put this lady on the spot. But I also don't like when, you know, when sometimes people have stories that are like, they give a story about a person and you're like, I wish I knew who they were talking about, but they don't.

Starting point is 00:22:04 Well, I'm going to say who I'm talking about. There's this person named Chris Williamson. Now, I like him, actually, personally. He's a podcaster, but he interviewed someone named Polina Pompliano. The reason I'm saying this is I would like some people who are watching this podcast to watch his podcast with her. Now, I see Polina Pompliano. She's not speaking about anything political, as far as I can tell.

Starting point is 00:22:26 But she still has that same distancing feeling from her speech in the sense that you don't feel like she speaks like that when she's not on camera. You don't feel like you're getting to talk to her. You feel like she has her talking points. And you can see it in the way that someone speaks in the sense that maybe because I've been doing podcasts all day. I was talking in my previous podcast that the reason why I pause so often and I look down and I look up and I close my eyes and it's because I'm trying to think. I'm trying to think. And whatever you say, often thoughts occur to me, but they're often contradictory. And so when you ask me a question, not that you asked me a question right

Starting point is 00:23:11 now, but when you do ask me a question, or when I have something to say, I'm fighting with myself to make sure that what I'm saying is genuine, that I'm not, that I'm not putting on a, that I'm not manufacturing my speech in order to give a certain appearance. And that it is what I mean. That it is what I think. And that it's, I try as best to be as loving as I can. Now that's like, who can do that, man? That's actually extremely, extremely difficult to be loving.

Starting point is 00:23:38 I was talking to someone and they're like, oh no, loving is easy. No, loving is hard. Loving is extremely hard. Because to love, if you truly loved you would be like jesus you'd be like buddha man so much of what we say comes from self-hate and hatred of others i also wonder how much of hatred of others is is purely self-hate that's something else i'm exploring we can explore that you've probably thought about that quite a bit either way i'm mentioning that person's name polinaina Pompliano, because I want

Starting point is 00:24:06 people, I'm requesting some help for people to look at Chris Williamson's interview with her and to help me articulate what is it about the way that she speaks that is inauthentic. She could be completely authentic. I could be wrong. But I see the same characteristic in her that I see in politicians like kamala harris and even joe biden and even for sure hillary clinton and even not obama obama was genuine at least i think so he had much more of a genuine character whatever that's my little rant please i'm requesting some help whenever you get the chance people who are watching look at that okay now that i'm done my little spiel do you mind continuing about your trajectory i'm interested in these things you're saying i don't know the

Starting point is 00:24:52 the reference that you're making to this uh interview but it is true that there's a lot of performativity and trained performance and processing and percolating that goes on in real time. What interests me, though, is how you bring Buddha and Jesus into this. And, you know, how do we even know anything about these people, right? We often refer to them, and somehow we know more about the current political figures than we do about those figures, but we feel as if we know the image of a jesus or a buddha so well um but i'm pretty sure that if we saw those people assuming jesus in particular even existed they'd have just as many ticks and people would look at them and say oh that's pretentious or that's rehearsed or that's whatever um and maybe all the more so in the case of the Buddha, because there'd be,

Starting point is 00:25:45 I would assume a lot of, well, also Jesus, a lot of textual memorization and recitation of what they're doing. So, I mean, that's just an interesting thing that comes up. To clarify, when I say Jesus, I actually mean more about the archetypal Jesus than the historical Jesus. So that is to say the perfect man. I'm calling the perfect man in the Christian sense Jesus. Now, whether or not Jesus was the actual perfect man historically, literally, if one wants to take that route, that's another issue. So that's what I mean when I say Jesus. Okay, so you then went to get your PhD in what subject?

Starting point is 00:26:25 Well, humanities. So it was kind of a weird thing because the humanities program didn't exist before that I entered it, and I was the first cohort to go through it. And that was a very – that was a big gamble, I guess, to take a PhD in a topic that was brand new. But that's what I did. And I was able to focus on history of religion, history of technology and science, and do some classics with the classical world and languages and whatnot. It's a great breath. It's a good mix. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 00:27:07 And then your work in memory started when, and that led you to hear how. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I was very depressed in university and here's like the big sob story of the kid who is struggling and blah blah blah but i discovered memory while i was near the end of my uh coursework for the phd and starting to prepare for the field exams and think about what i was going to do with my my dissertation there's a long history of depression going to the hospital etc experimenting with different medications and so forth and uh cam h cam h yeah that's the that's the hospital in toronto for mental health did they change the name of the clark because that's where i used to go oh no i don't know

Starting point is 00:28:00 about clark okay so maybe it's used maybe it used to be called that yeah i don't know about Clark. Okay, so maybe it used to be called that. Yeah, I don't know. Clark as in college and Spadina? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, then that's it. I used to call it the Rook because it kind of looks like a Rook piece in a chess game. But that's an interesting story in and of itself because I knew about the Clark because I had read Timothy Findlay's Headhunter. I knew about the Clark because I had read Timothy Findlay's Headhunter. And when I first wound up there, it was during my BA,

Starting point is 00:28:35 and I'd written some crazy poem and was pretty clearly in a manic episode. And the TA of one of my courses said, I'd come out of a lecture and I was just crying from John Keats. It touched me so deeply. And he'd read this poem that I'd written and I was going to you know do like a college shooting or something like this because I was so focused on this poetry I really just wanted to read the damn poem and then go to sleep because I was tired I'd been up for seven days writing this poem and the the TA sent me to the Clark anyway and I knew exactly what it was because I'd read Timothy Finley's Headhunter and uh took me a while to get there. But anyway, I didn't leave for three months after I showed up at the door at the Clark Institute. Okay. When you say you hadn't left for three months,

Starting point is 00:29:36 do you mean to say that they sequestered you? They put you in a room that you couldn't escape from because they thought you were a threat to yourself or someone else? Yeah, worse than that. I mean, I think it was the fifth floor and there's intensive care unit. And so it's almost like a prison. And so the floor is divided between sort of general open unit where there are rooms and people can freely move about. And then the intensive care, which is sort of has these cells that have sliding doors, and you're in there. You're locked into your own little room,

Starting point is 00:30:10 and you come out into the day room only certain hours. And the nursing station is behind glass because there's people throwing stuff at it, et cetera. It was wild. They gave you medication or just talk therapy? Well, I didn't want medication. I wasn't i wasn't i wasn't yet convinced that i was sick even though i sort of knew that i had to go to the hospital

Starting point is 00:30:31 just because i wasn't sleeping i don't know how long that i waited before that i submitted to their demands that i took take the medication that they were suggesting. But it was probably about three weeks or so. And I remember having as long of conversations as I possibly could have with the doctors. And I would tell them, you know, what I really need is some sort of Marxist Freudian psychoanalysis because it's obvious that, you know, the towers are beaming capitalism into my head. And I was reading Deleuze. So I was like citing capitalism and

Starting point is 00:31:12 schizophrenia and all this stuff. And I was convinced that the alphabet was built from numbers. And if you could unwind the alphabet and see the numerical structure of the universe, of it and see the numerical structure of the universe that, you know, whatever it was, it was pretty strange stuff. Um, and I knew enough about psychology. I was taught, I said, maybe it's hebofrenia and all this. I don't even really know that I knew what hebofrenia was, but I was talking, I was telling them I was running the show, uh, and they were going to let me burn out. And finally, one day, I guess something convinced me to take lithium. And then I just was moved eventually over to the quote-unquote general population. Then I started to get day passes and so forth.

Starting point is 00:31:57 And then eventually I was released. How does lithium make you feel? Or how did it? Does it deaden your feelings? Yeah, I spent maybe 10 years on lithium. And for me, it was like going into a no man's land. Just very monotonous. I think I still am a bit of a monotonous person now that I do different

Starting point is 00:32:27 practices to manage the mental illness. But it's like having a bit of a mental straitjacket on. And it also adds a layer of fat or it added a layer of fat to me. And in Toronto, it was especially and New York, both places I lived while I took lithium, it was quite dangerous in the summers because during the humidity, you could get lithium toxic shock or toxicity quite easily. So you're always playing this balancing game. You have to have the lithium levels just right so that you're not getting into trouble. And you just feel like you have to be babysat all the time because you have to have the levels checked,

Starting point is 00:33:07 you have to constantly get new prescriptions, and it wasn't the solution. But I didn't like it at all. For people listening or watching or tuning in right now for the first time and not knowing who Anthony is. Anthony is a, I wrongly called you a memory champion, but you're somewhat of a memory expert. You certainly know the different techniques and how to quickly memorize virtually any piece of of information that a regular memory champion would do as a almost parlor trick and you have

Starting point is 00:33:48 a tedx talk now this one's interesting i watched it it was about how to silence your inner voice or inner critic or whatever thoughts trouble you with two questions and that one is a tedx talk first of all that has a million views. Now, TEDx Talks generally have a few thousand to ten thousands of views. Yours has a million, and it was released just last year, which means it doesn't even have the advantage of being on YouTube for quite some time in order to amass such an amount of hits, which means that the quality is likely very high. So firstly, congratulations on getting a million hits on TEDx. Second, people who are watching for the first time, you can view that talk.

Starting point is 00:34:34 It'll be in the description. Okay, Anthony. Why did you first reach out to me? I remember that we had some email exchanges. Why don't you tell me what precipitated that? Well, first of all, you have a great channel. So that was one reason. And I also had, I have a project that I work on,

Starting point is 00:35:04 which has to do with promoting memory training. So I do know a lot about memory techniques and the competition history that I have is very sparse, but I did compete for charity one time and I actually did quite good. So it was, it was a lot of fun. I didn't, I didn't win for my charity, but I came in second. So that was nice. And I tell that story in the TEDx, how that all came to be in very brief strokes. But anyway, the techniques are often used for the outcome of winning competitions. And I find that, speaking of our earlier themes of pretense, I find that that is not pretentious, or themes of pretense, I find that that is not pretentious, but it has this kind of turning of a great tradition into weightlifting, essentially, weightlifting for the mind.

Starting point is 00:35:53 And so there's a lot of people who are just there to show off, and they're not really embracing the glory of memory techniques. So what that glory is, we can get into, but it has to do with learning, basically. And for the long term, rather than memorizing a bunch of stuff you're going to forget after you get your medal. Now, in terms of reaching out to you, you had, his name is Richard Heyer, is it? You had interviewed him. And I was, I've been thinking about IQ for a long time and intelligence and so forth. And I thought, if there's a way that people can before I saw your interview, if there's a way to improve intelligence, let's say, then what is the most likely way to do it? And it would be to improve where intelligence sits. What is it

Starting point is 00:36:41 that intelligence sits in? And so that would be memory and so i just basically reached out to you to let you know that i'd linked to your interview with him and i thought that was an interesting and compelling discussion because he was talking about potential drugs that might come in in the future and that makes sense to me and it seems to go with my thesis which is if is if you're going to improve memory or improve intelligence, you've got to improve what intelligence sits in. And so if it's going to be drugs, what are those drugs improving? Well, they're going to improve the brain, and brain is where memory sits. And then intelligence, I'm assuming, sits or at least is somehow in relationship with memory as such but also very specific levels of memory so i just let you know that i was linking to that and also as a youtuber i'm always fascinated

Starting point is 00:37:33 with what other youtubers are thinking and suggested you know jamming on the topic of youtube itself as a as an initiative razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars rover. Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson

Starting point is 00:38:16 Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence. It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual-edge blades that give you that old-school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash everything and use the code everything. Did you find any methods to increase one's IQq i read your article but i didn't see any

Starting point is 00:39:09 points about increasing iq per se but intelligence and that's different and for the people in the chat or people who are listening watching once this is on on replay, I find that people are extremely uncomfortable with the notion of IQ. And they like to point to Stephen Jay Gould, who has a critique on IQ. But his critique on IQ was more about whether or not IQ measures something nebulous called intelligence.

Starting point is 00:39:41 And intelligence, like I mentioned, is nebulous or bleary. It's not clear exactly what it is. People have different notions. And IQ measures something extremely specific. And IQ is correlated highly with different outcomes in life, as well as the ability to learn quickly, whether or not in, well, either way, the whole point of that is to ask, did you learn, or did you come across any methods to increase one's iq there are obviously ways to decrease it well if we pull yes if we pull back the kimono about what why that article exists there are people who search the term how to increase iq i have i've just been i had been thinking about it independently for a long time

Starting point is 00:40:25 because people on my YouTube channel ask me all the time, how can I increase my IQ? But one day my SEO came to me, which is for people who don't know internet stuff, is search engine optimization. And he's a search engine optimization expert. He's on my team. And so I just call him my SEO.

Starting point is 00:40:42 Anyway, he says, you should do this article on IQ. And I thought, ah, that's a bit risky, a little bit, you know, not, as you say, not the most safe topic necessarily. But people are searching for it. My mission is to reach people who are searching for things related to memory. So what the hell? I'll write about this. And I pretty quickly in that article say, let's change the definition of IQ. And then I talk about goal-oriented stuff. So the answer is, no, I don't necessarily have any ways to increase IQ. But by the same token,

Starting point is 00:41:18 I think it's worth the hypothesis to say, if we're going to increase it, what are the ways that we could increase it? And that article is now still a first draft. And we tend to update these things. Everything on the internet is beta. I mean, video is a bit hard to do after the fact. But in terms of articles and podcasts, you're able to just see, can we actually get the people who are searching for IQ with this? I told my SEO guy, look, I'm not going to do it the way that you told me to outline it. I'm going to do it this way and we'll see what happens. I haven't asked him whether it made it to page one or not. We're pretty good. We have 80-20 rule like everybody else in terms of getting to page one, but I'm fairly good at it with

Starting point is 00:42:01 certain keywords he throws at me. I don't know what we did with that one, but I thought it was worth a try because people are searching for it. And what they mean, I think, when they say, when they put into Google how to increase IQ, they mean, how do I get smarter? Right. And so in terms of how do you get smarter? I think I have included, I not only have, I got theories and techniques and strategies for people to do that, but I think I've got a proven track record of it. I mean, we've got lots of people who have passed exams that they didn't dream of passing before they started to train their memory and made advancements in learning languages, etc. that intelligence because if you can figure out how to set a goal how to do what it takes to accomplish that goal and then properly reward yourself once it's done with full modesty then what else what else would that be other than having increased your intelligence i fully acknowledge that it's not exactly directly addressing that article uh directly

Starting point is 00:43:03 addressing iq as the measured thing on those sorts of tests that has to do with spatial intelligence or spatial uh calculation ability and being able to match certain dimensional things and then there's verbal all that sort of stuff but i think that we could we could work on it. And I think that memory would be one of the places that we'd need to focus on. And raw memory training, I mean, it's only 120 years or something since Ebbinghaus started his very N equals one kind of memory experiments. Which is, I don't know about that. What is this person's name? Eddinghaus?

Starting point is 00:43:44 Ebbinghaus? Ebbinghaus? Ebbinghaus. Hermann Ebbinghaus. And he wrote, it's in German, Überdes Gedächtnis, which is basically about memory. And what he had done is he came up with the principles of the forgetting curve. And he had memorized a bunch of stuff. And he would just test how long it was before he forgot it. And that led to concepts

Starting point is 00:44:06 like primacy effect and recency effect, serial positioning effect, all of which, I mean, if we're going to just talk about intelligence in sort of straight language, what else would you call intelligence other than your ability to remember what you learned, see it in context, in real time, be able to juggle what people are saying, interact with them or whatever a test is saying and so forth, and not be destroyed by a forgetting curve, which is what a lot of people struggle with. Within three seconds, they'll forget your name. Within, you know, five days, they'll forget what they read etc and they're struggling with that so ebbinghaus was huge and it's we're really just at the beginning of memory as a as a science as a

Starting point is 00:44:54 study and it has historical philosophical biological chemical neuro chemical dimensions to it that's just waiting to be explored so what do you what do you say about the adaptive quality of forgetting so for example some people who have unbelievable memories for events in their lives like episodic memory they are often leading horrible lives you can see you can see there's a few documentaries on this where they remember exactly what they're eating 10 years ago on a certain day in the weather and so on and they they see their natural penchant for memory as being a curse in a sense because they remember all their mistakes and this one lady said you know how you ruminate at night when she was speaking to the camera how you say oh i wish i could have said this

Starting point is 00:45:49 then and so on so imagine doing that for every conversation for the past 20 years then i was watching price i don't know you probably would know much you're probably correct now as for there's this person who apparently has the highest iq in america now that's like who knows because iq at the extremely high range you can't actually test it in the way that people think you can whatever his name is chris langan you know i'm sure chris langan said that he doesn't have a great memory and that what he thinks intelligence is, is the proper selection of what you remember. So if you can remember a whole book, so what it matters, like you mentioned for your goals. So what do you say to that about memories? Memory is great. But at the same time, your brain,

Starting point is 00:46:40 one's brain is set up to forget for specific reasons. That means your memory has to be matched with adaptive forgetting. So it has to be adaptive memory and adaptive forgetting. So how do you balance that? Like what do you say to someone who has an obscene memory? Right. Well, superior autobiographical memory is a very interesting topic. And the full decisions about what it is and how it works aren't out. But there are a couple of cases where skeptics of superior autobiographical memory have done some research and they have seen

Starting point is 00:47:14 that there's a commonality amongst some of these cases. Because if it isn't a sort of savantism that's involved, there is an OCD level of self-rumination and often journaling. So I don't know if you're referring to Jill Price, but Jill Price was a highly publicized figure. The book is called The Woman Who Can't Forget, which I think was ghostwritten for her or with her. But in any case, it's an interesting book to read. But what the book doesn't talk about, but that was discovered by some people who are a little skeptical of this, is that she's an obsessive journaler. Right. And often rehearsing again and again and again what was journaled the day before. Now, I don't think that the obsessive journaling accounts for all of this, but I think it it's a clue to something that's going on in some people.

Starting point is 00:48:02 And it's interesting that it's autobiographical memory. to something that's going on in some people. And it's interesting that it's autobiographical memory. It's not clear that it's the episodic that is as strong, although obviously they blur. In any case, I don't know, but I don't know that it's clear that they have somehow lost adaptive forgetting in ways that others haven't.

Starting point is 00:48:21 I think it's maybe a little bit more clear that there's a commonality in terms of rumination that is leading to exactly the things that memory competitors do, or people who use memory techniques do, which is a kind of forced OCD, where you're rigging serial positioning effect to give everything primacy and recency so that you can remember it longer using what's called von reschdorf effect which is you exaggerate it and so you can look at cases like jill price and you know with all due humility that i don't know her and ever have talked to her and only seen interviews with her but it seems like she's exaggerating a lot of the events in her life which

Starting point is 00:48:59 would lead to them not only being more memorable, but causing more suffering. And I've done that to myself, you know, and I think we've all had that experience, that sting of something you said, and you just can't let it go. Well, what is it that you can't let it go? Is it because you constantly rehearse it and compound its value so that it shocks you more and more and becomes more and more painful? Or is it, I don't know, it's not necessarily clear. But to answer your question directly, forgetting is normal. It's sort of healthy.

Starting point is 00:49:32 But it's also not necessarily the case that you have to forget anything. You could work on it. But there will be a forgetting curve. At least that's what we see in the science. And I think we see it in, in our practical lives. If you don't use it, you will lose it. And even the English, the years I lived in Germany, I started to experience what's called linguistic de-skilling. My English skills went down and I noticed them going back up after I moved to Australia. It was

Starting point is 00:50:02 just the strangest thing. That's interesting. I wouldn't say that my English is profoundly good in any respect at all, but it had gone down noticeably, and I noticed it after living in an English-speaking country again, that it went back up. There was this one exercise you had recently on your channel. Maybe you've referenced it before, but I saw it in one of your most recent videos about the alphabet and visualizing it on your channel. Maybe you've referenced it before, but I saw it in one

Starting point is 00:50:25 of your most recent videos about the alphabet and visualizing it on a grid. Are you able to see all 26 letters at once in your mind's eye? No, but that's a good question. So when we think about can you see 26 letters at once, what do we mean by seeing 26 letters at once right so if i if i think you mean what i think you mean then the answer is no but at the same time there is an image of the alphabet and i can see that yeah see when i was doing it i don't think i even did the entire exercise but what i gathered from it i can imagine that i can vaguely see the entire exercise, but what I gathered from it, I can imagine that I can vaguely see the entire alphabet and that I can trick myself into thinking I'm seeing the alphabet because my eyes, just like my eyes right now are saccading around and I get an image of the whole,

Starting point is 00:51:14 but I'm actually only seeing a part at any point. I imagine that let's say I'm looking at, well, what's around G. Then I go around G and I see the plus or minus around G, maybe plus or minus two, plus or minus three around G. When I say plus or minus, I mean the letters. And then I saccade down to Z and then I saccade up to Q and so on. And I think that I'm seeing all 26 letters, but I'm not. So you're saying that the point of the exercise isn't to visualize all 26 at once, nor is it, well, that's not the point of the exercise. isn't to visualize all 26 at once, nor is it, well, that's not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is to help people begin to understand what the memory tradition is, and how and why working with what used to be called the Gematria is useful. I mean,

Starting point is 00:52:03 it's still called the Gematria. But a lot of memory techniques involve understanding that language is built from alphabet and alphabet builds language. And what we're doing when we use memory techniques is we're perceiving a sort of fundamental oneness or sameness in information that is differentiated by symbols. And there's multiple levels of mental imagery. So when I just said I can see the alphabet as a singular thing, I actually don't even mean that I can see it because seeing is a thing that eyes do, right? But the notion that eyes is an image that appears in my mind, right? So even the idea that eyes are a thing that sees is a mental image that has multiple properties right that is appearing as an image inside of my own image of my own consciousness i don't understand what i could

Starting point is 00:52:52 do i don't even know if i understand it either because it's a kind of infinite regress right and earlier you mentioned something about a oneness it with regard to memory what are you referring to there well yesterday i met with my monthly coaching group where we talk about memory stuff and I gave them an exercise which is or a game we played which is I said a sentence which was a white cat ate a frog and then the next student said a sentence and then the next student said a sentence and we all have to repeat the sentence that the previous person said that's great and I'm introducing into. And I'm introducing into it numbers. I'm introducing into it adjectives. I'm introducing into it. And they are naturally also. And when we got to the end, like everybody fails quite

Starting point is 00:53:34 quickly because it's quite hard. Right. But, you know, and somebody had mentioned Peyton Manning, who I guess is a football player. I'd never heard of this person before, but I used Preston Manning, who I think was the leader of the reform party at some point in Canadian political history as my image for that. Now, when I, what I described to them after is one of the reasons why I played the game better than they did is because I don't see the information different than they do. They, they think, oh my goodness, now I have to account for a verb. What image am I going to use for a verb? Oh, Peyton Manning is number one, is what one student said. Now I have to think number one, which is somehow different than the name Peyton Manning, right? And I just,

Starting point is 00:54:18 I don't see it that way because I've created this set of tools that allows me to just make it information as such. And there's an experience of oneness with the information because you're that fast in terms of elaborative encoding, it's called. So when you look at the kids who, I mean, it's not even just kids, but I just call them kids because they're getting younger and younger in the memory competitions. getting younger and younger in the memory competitions um they're memorizing decks of cards in like 17 seconds 12 seconds 52 individual cards in order with 100 accuracy there's a oneness that's going on between multiple layers of information order suit number perhaps they're even referring to color in how that they process suits and there's this is happening because the mind has been trained to disregard distortion and just connect in the moment but multi-layer multi-layers of information all the same the mind has been

Starting point is 00:55:20 trained or their mind because they were memory champions or working toward being that their mind has been trained or the mind all of our minds are trained like that well i don't know if we want to get into non-duality and uh the potential that it's just one mind doing it but let's just say for practical purposes somebody sat there and like an individual unit of consciousness sat there and trained the meat factory that is, you know, somehow producing that. And so the person who didn't train that isn't going to do it. You know, my best time with cards is two minutes and 30 seconds. And I got bored and I'm just like, not going to get faster than that. Cause you know, there's no practical benefit to my life to be able to memorize faster than two minutes and 30 seconds.

Starting point is 00:56:05 But I can tell you, in that moment, you're one with all the things. It's like being in task positive network or what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow. It's just flow. But to get there, you have to annihilate the idea that information is different. It's just information. And you have the toolsilate the idea that information is different it's it's just it's just information and you have the tools and you just okay explain to me let's say there's a i know that's fake but that's what it feels like let's take an ordinary person or a typical member of the population you pick someone from the street and you say memorize these 10 cards let's make it simple 10 cards they may take a

Starting point is 00:56:47 minute or so and then they may get some wrong and how are they trying to memorize and how is that different when one is thinking of the information as being of the same vellum or the same cloth or the same type like i don't i've i've like helped me through how much how i'm supposed to understand that i don't i'm so far removed from what a normal person would do quote unquote normal person that it's hard for me to guess what that experience is like but let me imagine it they're probably thinking okay jack of clubs and then next comes queen of hearts they may be repeating it aloud to themselves as well yeah and then they're trying to mentally juggle and and then it was you know was it was jack of spades with jugger clubs right right they're already getting jumbled up whereas the the trained person, Jack of Clubs is a cheetah, and Queen of Hearts is a bone.

Starting point is 00:57:48 So now the cheetah, and I'm not going to speak for all memory confederates because some of them do this differently, but this is the basics. The cheetah is now going to throw the bone at whatever the symbol is for the next card. So let's say it's Ace of Spades. So they're going to throw a bone at the frog right so now that's going to help person object object action or is that different person action object yeah um they don't all do it exactly that way but the idea is is that if you have 52 cards to memorize you're going to have a person action object a person action object person action object typically this is going to be layered out in a memory palace. And so that's like, you know, Price is Right is the one where they spin the wheel and then they guess the words.

Starting point is 00:58:35 I think that's Wheel of Fortune. Oh, sorry, Wheel of Fortune, yeah. Well, Price is Right also has a wheel, but there you go. Yeah, that's right. Bob Barker versus Pat Sajak. has a wheel but there you go that's right bob barker versus pat sajak um uh the the whatever it is there's there's a cell in position probably the price is right wheel is is a little bit better sure sure because um i don't know it doesn't matter the idea is that there's a cell in space and that cell is gonna yeah like a like you know on the price of white wheel that spins around, it's got like 200, 300, etc.

Starting point is 00:59:06 But now imagine that you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And in position one, you're going to have a cheetah. And then you just turn the wheel. And then in position two, you're going to have a bone. And then you turn the wheel. And in position three, you're going to have a toad. So that I can now remember. I'm even just managing my own memory right now.

Starting point is 00:59:24 I think if you look at the transcript, I said Jack Jack of clubs, queen of hearts and is made right. Because, uh, yeah, well, I mean, I have a crap, I have a bad memory. If I don't use these tools, I forget the stuff it's gone, you know? Um, so, but when I use these things and I'm, and I'm well practiced, then it's even better. Um, because you know, you can throw down and say, Hey, I'm going to compete for charity today and not walk away completely embarrassed, but actually do half as well as a guy who has two Guinness world records, which I think was quite something actually, especially given that I was hung over and not feeling well in many regards, but that's what it is. That's what you do. And you have to be one with it. You have to be so, it's like a martial art. Like you're, you're not sitting there. If you're engaged in, in sparring

Starting point is 01:00:11 or in an actual combat, heaven forbid, you're not thinking, Oh, Kata this or whatever. You're just trained that this is coming in and you're going to fold it and put it into place. And you're going to do it in a way that it stays there. Your enemy doesn't want to move after they've confronted with you because you're just zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. I see. And that's basically what I mean by oneness. You don't have time to think about it.

Starting point is 01:00:36 You don't have time to fret about it. You don't have time to hum and haw about it. This must translate to that, and it must do so in a way that lasts for as long as you need it to last. See, when I think about what oneness means, I'm thinking about being different ripples in the field of consciousness and so on, and all that exists is simply the sea of experience. simply the sea of experience. When you're describing encoding different phenomenon, like cards or whatever it may be,

Starting point is 01:01:16 I still don't see how it's one other than what you've alluded to, which is it becoming reflexive. I don't see reflex as being, or at least not conscious deliberation. I don't see that as being the same as one. So when you say one, I don't think I'm understanding it correctly. Let's say you have these cards and the regular person may repeat the card over and over in order. They get to card number three, they go back to card number one, number two, number three, number four. Okay, I got number four. Now let me go back. One, two, three, four, five. Okay, I got those cards. got number four now let me go back one two three four five okay i got those cards i see that as not being efficient and it but i don't see the oneness in in the explanation that you gave like

Starting point is 01:01:50 what is the oneness you're translating it down to cheetahs and to bones and so on but there's no oneness between cheetah and bones at least i don't see so do you mind helping well let's let's look at the word oneness itself right oneness is where when you're when you're reflecting on oneness where is it all around well where is that like you're genuinely asking me to go yeah i'm asking you not because i'm interested in creating radio silence but if you really think about it where is the concept of oneness and then you say well it's all around but then where is the concept of oneness? And then you say, well, it's all around. But then where is the concept of all around? And then it's just going to be an infinite regress. And the answer is, I have no idea.

Starting point is 01:02:30 Because right now, Kurt is appearing in me, right? And you're, I don't know, you're in Toronto. What's Toronto? Well, Toronto is appearing in me. And everything's just appearing right now in me. And I assume it's appearing in you, right? So if there's a oneness, and you and I are connecting right now, we're having a conversation. Hopefully it's a good one for you.

Starting point is 01:02:50 I'm having fun myself and so forth. The oneness is right now. It's right here. This is it, right? We can call it oneness. We can say there's a reflection this or recursion that, yada, yada, yada, whatever we're doing. We're just piling on more words and those words are coming into this space right now, right? And if you're going to recall back to a conversation later, well, then something about that lasted. When did it last? Where did it last? Well,

Starting point is 01:03:15 right now, it's in this, whatever we call this, we can just pile on more words. But the very idea that oneness is defined differently by you has only so much difference because we are now communicating about that difference, which requires a sameness. It requires a oneness in order for it to even happen. So when we're memorizing cards or whatever it is that we're doing, we are experiencing a fundamental oneness that information appears in us, and we have tools to make that appearance so robust that it lasts to reappear in us later. I think we get into semantics when we try to get into what oneness means, because oneness only means by virtue of it being in the field that is perceiving the very concept of meaning itself and i feel like i'm like on the verge of just spouting endless deepities that sound make me sound like a the kind of person i don't actually want to sound like but what what what else can you say you know this is the this is the problem

Starting point is 01:04:22 of discussing things like spirituality and yeah and yada yada yada because you just end up saying endless deepities but at the same time sorry what is that deepities this is this is like in the atheist community uh a weapon that they use uh oh i didn't know that i know yeah well woohoo. Yeah, well, woo-woo is another one, right? But a deepity basically is something that sounds really profound and so forth, but actually isn't because to unspool it, you only end up putting more thread into the basket rather than less. And I'm very deeply concerned about that because I study Sanskrit and I look at these ancient traditions. And when I get through the deepities, so to speak, what I find is that actually they're more atheist than anything I've ever seen in my life. I started to call it

Starting point is 01:05:17 uber-atheist. I thought I used to be an atheist, but damn, in some of these ancient texts why don't you take us through some of or just take us through your journey from atheism to i don't know what you would call yourself now but probably not atheist so let's just say not uber atheist i like uber atheist okay so especially because uber has some nuances in german and also for the people listening anthony has a website do you mind telling people where they can find out more about you not that we're ending but just so that people can make note of it um magnetic memory method.com and hey anthony you may not know this but when i was searching your name in my inbox i wanted to make sure that I sent you all the correct information. I noticed I had 20 emails from you from before.

Starting point is 01:06:06 I'm like from 2019 or 2018. And it turns out that I signed up for your, I signed up for your newsletter quite some time ago and I had forgotten. So that's pretty cool. I probably, I wasn't as memorable as I hoped. Well, I don't recall why I did that.

Starting point is 01:06:26 I'm not sure. But anyway. Well, in the great chaos and vastness of the internet, it often proves to not be as big as it seems. So there's this guy. His name is Jonathan Willis. I want you all to know that Anthony Metivier responds promptly, personally, and repeatedly to questions about this talk if you contact him via his website.

Starting point is 01:06:48 I've corresponded with him twice today, actually. So just so people know, people in the chat, people who are listening, you can contact Anthony. Anthony responds, I don't know, at least in my experience, respond with quite detailed messages like you care. And I don't know where you get the time to do so but if people do have questions they can easily contact you and you're more than likely to respond. Where do you get the time and the inclination to do this? Well I'll show you my secret weapon if you like. This enables me to type about three times faster than most humans can even imagine typing. It's a special keyboard.

Starting point is 01:07:27 What is it? What the heck is it? So this is called a safe type keyboard. And it has the keys vertical and split on both sides. So that reduces strain on your wrists. And you type like this. And so, yeah. I'm also a typing addict so yeah if i answer in detail it is because i care but i'm also you know doing my own dopamine addiction management

Starting point is 01:07:54 at some level i haven't seen that keyboard before do you mind giving me it's called a display of how you would type without actually typing? Yeah. Some chaos may go on on my other computer here. But I would just say, hi, Kurt. How are you? Good. And then if I'm in an actual position

Starting point is 01:08:18 or at my stand-up desk. So it just looks like that. And if you can do touch typing, I guess it's called where you're not looking by the way, you can train yourself because this, these people who came up with this are genius. It has mirrors. My mirrors broke off a long time ago, but you have these mirrors that come out and that can help you train to be able to, to see the keys. And you know, some of the numbers can be kind of tricky. But in the middle, there's a number pad.

Starting point is 01:08:48 So it's great. What's that called? It's called SafeType. SafeType. I believe that's their URL, but they haven't updated their site in forever. I think you can get them through Amazon and whatnot. Okay, so we're going through your journey from atheism to whatever you are now. Right, right. Uber atheist. Well, it's a long story as many stories are, but

Starting point is 01:09:13 here I have my, I've been drinking from my waking up cup from the Sam Harris podcast back when it was called waking up. And I guess somehow he was part of being like a militant atheist because you know when i went to do my phd you have to do this like language thing so i picked biblical hebrew and why i picked biblical hebrew as opposed to any other of the many possible languages that you could work on was because i wanted to have revenge on my mother. I was a very angry person about having been brought up in the church. And I had a feeling that if I could read for myself what the Bible says, then I would just have endless toys to play with during all kinds of conversations. And, you know, it turns out that you do have endless toys when you can read a bit

Starting point is 01:10:01 of biblical Hebrew to play with. But I've gotten a lot of peace with that and I don't even use it anymore. But Sam Harris, one day driving through the United States, listening to NPR, and he says, what is this word atheist all about anyway? We don't call people who don't believe in astrology non-strologists. So it's kind of like a silly thing. And that kind of hooked me because I like that, you know, I like to cut through the chase and get at what's going on here. And really, there's no such thing as atheism. There should be no need for it. It's not an ism. In the same way, in logic, it's a bad choice to call paraconsistencies, what is it called? Dialytism, right? Cause it's not a belief. Dialytism is not a belief in anything. It's just noticing that there are sometimes

Starting point is 01:10:51 para consistencies. You're not an, it's not an ism, but somehow they chose the ism. So atheism and me being called an atheist is already problematic from when I quote unquote got into it. Right. But I was quite militant about it. And because I'm a bit of a theatrical person, sometimes, you know, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. And I saw for a long time, religion, religious belief, irrational things as part of the problem and that somewhat hasn't changed but it has softened to also look at counter examples counter arguments and then realize wait a second evolution has forwarded this for a very long time and if anything it's getting stronger and you know i did

Starting point is 01:11:41 a lot of film studies etc etc and it just sort of doesn't make sense to be so black and white. You're either for the science or you're against it kind of thing. And studying Sanskrit really changed or deepened my idea and understanding of what science is anyway, in terms of making hypothetical claims, providing evidence for and against things to either bolster them, at least for a time, or discredit them, also, at least for a time. And then just thinking about n equals one as a scientific proposition itself, which is whether solipsism is real or a problem or not, is what we're forced to do. We are scientific beings. And then, you know, it reminded me a lot of Nietzsche. And I had a great professor at European Graduate School

Starting point is 01:12:32 when I did an MA there named Fred Alphers, who was the chair of the Nietzsche Studies program there. And he had pointed out, Nietzsche does not mean God is dead. Nietzsche means that if that's the way you're going to worship your God, he may as well be dead. And I think that that nuance, and you see it in Nietzsche when you read it with that in mind, that nuance makes all the difference in the world. So that's kind of the journey there. And

Starting point is 01:12:59 something about studying, you know, Sanskrit and meditating with long form memorization, so that you not only understand it, but you then become to prep, you come to practice it. So you remind yourself of the principles of non duality, you remind yourself of, of flow, because your procedural memory is so highly trained to do it, then. Yeah. I mean, it's just more words, atheism, stuff, it's just more words, atheism stuff. It's just more words appearing in consciousness. And the question really is, what do you do with that moment? Do you enjoy the ride or don't you? Do you show up at your best to help others or don't you?

Starting point is 01:13:36 That kind of stuff is... How does Sanskrit help? I don't know that it does. Although there may be something to the Sanskrit itself. I don't know. So Gary Weber, who I read a lot of his books, he mentions, he just sort of like throws this away as a comment in Happiness Beyond Thought,

Starting point is 01:13:59 that there may be something about where the tongue touches the mouth with certain languages that creates certain things in the default mode network of the brain there may be something about where the tongue touches the mouth with certain languages that creates certain things in the default mode network of the brain or the task positive network of the brain that can lead one to you know the experience of a quote-unquote deeper state of consciousness but really how can if you have consciousness how could it really be deeper than anything else? I don't know, unless you're participating in the manufacture of that, which I think you can do without self-delusion. But at the end of the day, it's not clear to me that it has to be Sanskrit.

Starting point is 01:14:37 The thing is that the Sanskrit that I've studied encodes certain messages, and so there's benefits to singing that we know. You know, there's studies that show that your brain is producing healing chemicals when you sing. There's benefits to having certain messages in your mind as opposed to other ones. And because I use a memory palace to do all of this, there's benefits to that as well. us to do all of this. There's benefits to that as well. Dr. Tim Dalglish has done studies on using memory palaces to help people with depression and with PTSD that has shown great results. So I don't know that it has to be Sanskrit, but I think that there's possibly something about the way the tongue touches the mouth that maybe has some benefits. And I think there's definitely a message benefit,

Starting point is 01:15:27 even though it's pretty brutal in its consequences, in its implications, if you're not ready for it, so to speak. Is there an exercise you can take me through now, almost live? Like, well, Wim Hof obviously has the wim hof exercises that one can do is there one obviously would have to be for a well it doesn't have to be but i imagine it would be great if it was for a particular purpose like let's say you were training me right now to get into a state where i can memorize the deck of cards and under a minute that's not going to happen at least not right now and it may take years to do that but is there something else

Starting point is 01:16:05 that you can is there some exercise you can take me through maybe one that involves sanskrit because i i don't know any sanskrit i don't know how i i haven't said a single word of sanskrit consciously and i'm curious as to how the pronunciation of a particular word may impact my consciousness in a different manner. Yeah, well, we could cook something up. Yeah, yeah, let's do it. If you don't mind. Anything.

Starting point is 01:16:31 Since you mentioned it, though, it wouldn't take you years to memorize a deck of cards. I mean, I've never done it under a minute, but two minutes and 30 seconds did not take me years. It wouldn't take you that long. Josh Fore, who wrote the very famous book, Moonwalking with Einstein, I think it was six months before he was off in competitive mode and did quite well. So it doesn't have to take that long. Deck of Cards, though, is not necessarily the high order goal that a lot of people want. I was being facetious.

Starting point is 01:16:57 Right, right. But in any case, if you want to boost up memorizing Sanskritkrit then within a weekend you would have techniques to be able to memorize sanskrit how about this anthony if you don't mind is there a way is there some exercise you can take me through right now that would put my mind that would calm me not that i have a problem with being not that i'm not calm right now speaking to you but i'm but i'm i'm curious yeah so a very simple one is is called uh kirtan kriya which is you take your hands like this and you go satanama satanama satanama satanama satanama okay

Starting point is 01:17:46 apparently in the science you've got to do this for two and a half minutes or three minutes or something to start to get a benefit and I have to say it aloud or I can say it in my head I think you could do both okay now there's some ideas that those

Starting point is 01:18:02 syllables mean something I really don't know whether they mean something or not, and I don't care. But the research shows that this improves memory, concentration, and so forth. And we can do it together for as long as you want. But if you want to get more benefit from it, you don't have to just go repetitively,

Starting point is 01:18:20 sa-ta-na-ma, sa-ta-na-ma. You can also go sa-na-ta-ma. Skip the syllables. Now, what does that do for you? Well, that starts to train you in how memory techniques work in terms of giving primacy and recency through serial positioning effect to different, quote-unquote, stations in space. And that improves concentration a lot

Starting point is 01:18:45 because then it becomes a bit of a game that's challenging. Have you experimented at all with dual NBAC? Yeah. And, you know, those things relate to these kinds of exercises. What I like about this, as opposed to those softwares that people put together, it's in your hands. You're producing it yourself,

Starting point is 01:19:07 which creates a bit more of a challenge. It also creates more frustration at some level. But if you can show up to balance that curve between challenge and frustration, I think you get more benefits out of it because you're improving the very field of your conscious experience by using the field itself without external reference.

Starting point is 01:19:32 Even if what I'm suggesting to you is externally referenced you know okay i'm gonna try this right now if i make a fool of myself just please forgive me so i'm going to i'm going to play around with this and i know this may be boring to you for a minute or so but is it all right if i do this yeah please it's not boring to me at all okay sata nama okay yeah sata na ma sata nama Sat. Ta. Sat. Now, what I'm doing right now is almost as if I'm playing my own game in my head, where I'm... I'm choosing... I'm trying to choose randomly.

Starting point is 01:20:22 Obviously, you can't manufacture your own randomness, but as randomly as I can choose a different syllable for a different finger and to try to remember that for the duration of the full satanama. Now, is that the correct way or am I just ruining the exercise? How should I be doing this, essentially? Well, it comes back to what you said, like let's have a goal. So if we have a goal, then we can think about whether the technique is correct for getting to that goal or not. True, true, true.

Starting point is 01:20:54 Playing around and experimenting is great. In what I have tried to do, maybe we should talk about what I tried to do. Yeah, sure. What are your daily practices? How about we get to that? That's a question I ask tried to do. Maybe we should talk about what I tried to do. Yeah, sure. What are your daily practices? How about we get to that? That's a question I ask everyone in the exordium, but I didn't ask you and I apologize. So what are your daily rituals? What are your practices?

Starting point is 01:21:15 These practices are all oriented towards a specific goal, which is can you silence your mind? Can you experience complete mental silence? And so the practice is there, and this is pretty much daily. I'm quite good, but nobody's, I don't think anybody's 100%, but I'm pretty close. Every day I recite what is a growing body of Sanskrit verses that I've memorized. And I stretch, do a little bit of, you know,

Starting point is 01:21:46 kind of like yoga stuff, and do a bit of silent meditation, do some walking, do some journaling. And then I do what in some of these traditions, they call it karma yoga, which is just to do my work and let go of the outcome, literally practicing, letting go of the outcome, you know, and let go of the outcome, literally practicing, letting go of the outcome, you know, because thoughts will arise like, Oh, I hope this is a successful day, etc. I hope that this helps that person or if only this number was higher. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, all this vanity metrics that you get into when you're on the internet, and just let it go practice letting go letting go letting go. So basically, my ritual is to just do that all day long. But I premise it or preface it and premise it upon daily recitation of what

Starting point is 01:22:33 I memorized. Not every day but often memorizing another piece to learn more about the philosophy, to have a longer meditation so that it incrementally grows in time, and just to reflect upon the practice itself. That's basically it. Do you mind giving me some tips on letting go and calming one's mind? Yeah, I could give lots of tips. i think the the interesting thing for me about it and this is the tip is to try to to try to realize that you you have a mind that allows you to be aware that you have a mind and everything that's coming into consciousness is the mind, is that mind.

Starting point is 01:23:26 It is that thing that you are wrestling with, right? So this kind of comes back to oneness. And what is non-duality really, right? Is non-duality sitting around and like trying to stop your mind and have silence all the time or whatever, which I think is a fun goal. I do work on it. I have had these experiences of total silence, but the real tip is, is just to be able to be in a position where you just deal with whatever comes period. Right. And so, you know, as much as I've practiced over the years, something will still happen and I'll get pissed off and then just be able to wait. this is a thing that's appearing

Starting point is 01:24:06 in this field of consciousness and then just deal with it work with it yeah and just you know you know a lot of people will say label it but then i think you go deeper or deeper you you just say i'm you realize you're even labeling the thing. And then you're, why are you doing it? Well, because you have this fantasy that some strategy of labeling is going to now dissolve or neutralize the anger. Whereas there's also the realization of the idea that doing something in response to the label is then going to have this magic effect. I see. you know, is then going to have this magic effect. I see. I see. Really what you are doing, I'm trying to do is be more aware of this idea that there's magic, that you could somehow change whatever your biology is doing, as opposed to having strategies to just be with the biology,

Starting point is 01:25:00 you know, like Eckhart Tolle would say beyond name and form, you know, just even the guy who shows up to label the experience as if the labeling is somehow going to do something. You're now experiencing that as yet another thing that is appearing in this field of consciousness. Okay. So working on that practice is the biggest tip. How do you do that? Well, you just get started and you keep practicing and you set up the game so that your mind yourself reminds you. And that's procedural memory. How do you do that? Well, I would highly recommend memorizing some text that is written for that precise purpose and do it

Starting point is 01:25:37 daily and even throughout the day so that instead of, oh, now I'm going to label angry and then that's going to like help me. Instead of that, you have something else, which is more like what I talked about in the TED Talks. Are these thoughts useful? How do they behave? There's 28 more questions that you can ask and they're very useful. I have about 28 questions right now. So I'll pick one or two of them. One of them is when you mentioned how do these thoughts behave?

Starting point is 01:26:05 That one actually isn't useful for me. The first one is. I actually like that first one. I used it last night. Are these thoughts useful? But then the how do these thoughts behave, I don't know why this is, but for whatever reason, that actually brings me into more introspection and makes me observe the thoughts and watch how they flow

Starting point is 01:26:22 and relate to one another rather than an elimination of the thoughts or a calmness of the mind. It's more like that's helping me think about thoughts, which is still thinking. So I like the first one. I didn't find the second one helpful, but I probably don't have the same idea as to what you have when you say, how do these thoughts behave? Maybe I'm thinking of it differently. Forget about that. We're going to put it to the side and I can come back to that.

Starting point is 01:26:47 What you mentioned earlier was that let's imagine there's irritation, annoyance, anger, fear, boredom. Let's imagine we don't want those. Now you're saying, Kurt, if you go into it thinking, I don't want this, so let me apply some technique to eliminate it. That itself is, well, it's still an object in consciousness. It's still a want. And thus, you're not getting to the core of boredom or anxiety or fear or anger is more the result of some other process and but if you try to just eliminate it then you're going about it incorrectly is that correct or is that inane no i just would would say that the the observation would then be correct according to what according to to whom and to who is it that the very notion of correctness appears so this is where it can sound like super frustrating but in a lot of these non-duality things it's just like this is where your fuko comes out maybe maybe because fuko and non-duality are not that difference

Starting point is 01:28:04 not that different right what is Foucault saying at least in crime or discipline and punish um he's saying you know well yeah these these uh peripraxies and Freudian slips are always fascinating if you want to indulge in being fascinated by okay okay which I do sometimes, but anyway, the point is, you know, Foucault is talking about a process by which you internalize the surveillance so that the surveillance doesn't even have to exist. Right. You just have become, let's, let me stop you there. Okay. Let me think about that. Internalize the surveillance so that the surveillance doesn't exist. It doesn't have to. It doesn't have to it doesn't have to that

Starting point is 01:28:45 subtlety matters yeah do you mind explaining what that means so internalize the surveillance first let's take it right there what is the surveillance well we're now like playing a game here where fuko is now suddenly a a great sage but um i think that it's a i think it's a good analogy because at least as i understand discipline and punish, he's saying that the panopticon is so constructed that the cameras don't have to be real. that they behave as if it was real, and they behave in such a way that they monitor their own behavior as if the consequences of the camera that may or may not be real is real, and those consequences are real. So if we translate that to the idea of non-duality and the spiritual or philosophical state of being able to manage yourself to such an extent that you are free and peaceful and satwik as they say in uh sanskrit which is just you know bliss uh well then that

Starting point is 01:29:53 yeah it's s-a-t-t-v-i-c uh so i guess i'm not a sanskritist but i guess if you're like really hardcore whatever a lot of a lot of these becomes. Like it's Bhagavad Gita, not Bhagavad Gita. Anyway, whatever. Oh, okay, okay. That's the opposite of German. Well, I mean, the German takes the Ws

Starting point is 01:30:11 and makes it into a V. Yeah, I mean, I guess so. Wittgenstein, you're right, yeah. In any case, I think it's an interesting way to think about it because if you read someone like Shinzen Young's, uh, the science of enlightenment, which is a great book, he basically says, do all the stuff, meditate, et cetera. But the minute you think that you're

Starting point is 01:30:38 somehow in a blissful state or whatever, that's the minute that you say, to whom is this actually occurring? Who is it that thinks, oh, now this is bliss, right? That's what you're after. You're after the image that thinks it is experiencing the image as if it's somehow different than the image that it's experiencing, right? Okay. And so now if we go back to the panopticon thing, the goal of the surveillance state is to make it that that person is so connected with the idea of surveillance that the surveillance doesn't even have to exist. They are just obedient. Power has conducted the conduct of others to such an extent that they obey even in the absence of something to monitor this. And Shinzen Young is essentially saying that true non-dual experience

Starting point is 01:31:26 has something exactly like that. You no longer are sitting there thinking I'm blissful or I'm not blissful or yada, yada, yada. You are now just so one with whatever is happening that you are what is happening. You don't sit there and monitor it. You don't have like this idea that, you know, oh, this is an image that's appearing in me, and the image now has multiple images inside of it. No, no, no. This is all just disappeared. It is now just happening without commentary, right? Because you now know that you are it, the Sanskrit, tat tvam asi, you are that.

Starting point is 01:32:04 Okay, two thoughts occurred to me anthony when i hear that one is an objection one is how do i know this is not i'm not fighting dory it's just an intellectual curiosity how does one know that the feeling of the screen or is the perceiver and the perceived being one in the same how does one know that that itself is not an illusion in the same way that we're so deluded on a regular basis in our everyday life as to thinking that there's that distinction and then one says well you can get to a state where that's blurred and it's all one, and you no longer have that distancing, it's all just one. Well, how does one know that that itself is not an illusion? That's question number one. I'm going to get back to that. Don't worry, I'll delineate these again. Then question number two was about the point of it.

Starting point is 01:32:59 Sometimes when I hear people in the non-duality community speak, nothing against non-duality, I think I may be on the route to becoming a non-dualist. I don't know. I don't know. As I explore this podcast more and more, I'm getting pulled in so many directions that I'm becoming both a dualist, a pluralist, and a monist at the same time.

Starting point is 01:33:19 That's the point, right? Because if you really get into this, the answer to the question is another question. To whom is the very question appearing, right? And from a non-dualist perspective, the question is appearing to us right now as we're connected in this one moment. or there isn't a God. It's irrelevant whether there's duality or non-duality or all that sort of stuff. This is it, right? And five minutes ago was it. Five minutes from now, well, what is five minutes from now?

Starting point is 01:33:51 Five minutes from now is an image that's appearing to us right now as we converge upon that. So I know it's frustrating, but that's basically what they're trying to get at. That I find insightful, which is the understanding that the future itself, the concept of the future itself is another content in consciousness. And all that you have are contents in consciousness, including the concept of time,

Starting point is 01:34:15 including the concept of space. Including the concept of having anything. Including the concept of having, including the concept of consciousness itself. including the concept of consciousness itself so well that one it's it's far too meta for me to experience during this conversation that one i imagine i would need to close my eyes because i'm not as trained as you i would need to close my eyes for about 10 minutes to get to a state where i can where i can understand that at an intuitive level or i can experience it rather than try to intellectually understand it so let let's forget about that. The first question. My objection is let's not forget about that because that's the point. It's not about training or experience or anything like that. If you are conscious,

Starting point is 01:34:54 you are conscious, period, whether you've trained it or not. So the idea that I have more consciousness than you or the idea that some dude sitting in a cave has more because he's meditated for way longer than we have and he's memorized way more sanskrit has more consciousness than you or i do no no that that's that's what we're trying to eliminate or at least that's what the i find the authentic teachers of this tradition is trying to eliminate that idea that there's somehow any sort of level or difference or this that or the other thing you can close your eyes you cannot close your eyes it's all just appearing in consciousness as it is now and as consciousness is now you can't take anything away from it you can't cut it you can't divide it you can't this

Starting point is 01:35:36 that or the other thing because what would that mean right it's just endless stacking on of trying to get at the thing that is producing the thing that you're you know i i understand i don't understand sorry i understand at an intellectual level what i mean to say and i know that there's an absolute difference between understanding it at an abstract cognitive level versus embodying it or feeling it now you may say that that's also not a distinction that needs to be made but i when i say that what i mean to say is there is absolutely a difference between trying to explicate what love is and define in terms of oxytocin and understand it in terms of its biochemical interactions and feeling love those are absolutely different so what i'm saying is perhaps during this conversation i may get to the point where i can intellectually understand

Starting point is 01:36:24 I'm saying is perhaps during this conversation, I may get to the point where I can intellectually understand the ideas of non-duality, but I don't think I can feel it. Maybe I can, and I would love to. Maybe we can get through some exercise. I don't think I can feel it during this conversation, though, unlike some of the spiritual leaders, which would say that the intellectualization of some of these spiritual concepts actually removes you from where you should be. I don't know if that's the case because I found what you said about the future being encapsulated in the present moment too, to be insightful. And that actually helps me. I can imagine that helps me later when I'm meditating or trying to feel as if I'm one or as if there's nothing else besides my feelings. Getting back to what I was saying, there's number one, which is the illusion. How do you know that

Starting point is 01:37:13 the oneness itself isn't an illusion? I've always wondered this when Sam Harris and many others say, well, the eye is an illusion. It's a persistent illusion. Well, how do you know the idea that the eye is an illusion it's a persistent illusion well how do you know the the idea that the eye is an illusion isn't itself an illusion okay so that so that's one we can explore we'll get back we'll get back to that number two is when you mentioned about quantifying consciousness and relating it between different people like you said you're not more conscious or you don't have more consciousness than i do and and someone in a cave who's a prodigious meditator doesn't so on so on okay that's interesting then it made me wonder well what about zero consciousness is there such is there such a

Starting point is 01:37:59 thing a concept an existence of zero consciousness we're going to explore that i'm just giving you the table of contents right now and then number three what i wanted to know was what's the point so yeah that's the big question right the pragmatist because some of these people that are more spiritual non-dualist types would say look how little fear i have look how little look how calm and equanimitable i am but then the point is not imperturbableness it's not to pursue that so then i'm wondering well what is the point what is the point and they're like there is no point okay so then why should i be like you you don't have to be like me okay well what's the point of what what am i to do okay so those are the three right we

Starting point is 01:38:43 have the illusion how do i know that the oneness isn't an illusion? Number two is, is there such a thing as zero consciousness? And number three, what is the point? Let's tackle them one by one. Is that okay? Right. Well, which one do you want to start with? Let's start with number one.

Starting point is 01:38:55 So how does one know that the illusion, sorry, how does one know that this oneness itself isn't an illusion? Now, I'm going to change my headphones because this one's about to die. All right. And I'll get a sip of water. I've been doing this. Anthony, I've been doing this all day. But this is energizing me, so don't worry.

Starting point is 01:39:20 Hold on. I can't hear you yet. I guess I should have spoken. Give me a second. But I was content with radio silence. I can't hear you i guess i should have spoken me a second but i was content with radio silence okay hello hello hello hello hello see if the people in the chat are still here and how many people there are and if they have any pressing questions as well thank you how are you enjoying this is it all right for you? Anthony? You're asking that to me or is it the chat?

Starting point is 01:39:49 Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you, you. Yeah, I'm having lots of fun. But I sort of am aware that this can get into like a kind of intellectual noodling that it is the question of always what is the point? And I think that a lot of the point that we get to is that some of us just really enjoy this kind of stuff. And others, you know, haven't come to experience this flavor of intellectual jazz. But in terms of knowing whether the illusion is an illusion or it isn't, I don't know that we get to know. isn't, I don't know that we get to know. And that's the question of hard solipsism versus soft solipsism or no solipsism. And I think most people who think about this agree that the threat of hard solipsism, whether you're in a spiritual tradition or not, can lead to nihilism. It's almost, you'd be kind of strange if you didn't go through

Starting point is 01:40:46 nihilism as a result of this these thought processes if only for a time and in the spiritual world they often call that the dark night of the soul you know because you can't know you can't know whether it's an illusion or not uh what are they calling the dark night nihilism or something else well i i'm drawing a parallel. And it may not be in the same way that Foucault's Panopticon is not exactly a great perfect analogy for non-duality. This is not a great perfect fit either. But I think that in hard solipsism, there's a parallel to be made with what happens in Dark Night of the Soul. Because if you can't solve the problem, if you can't really figure out how do I know whether

Starting point is 01:41:30 this is an illusion or not, then, you know, nihilism is the kind of direct consequence of that because then so what? What is the purpose? Who cares? Look at guys like Zizek. I like Zizek. I had him as a professor at European Graduate School oh did you that's pretty cool the guy seems to me like the joker of of um philosophy right like he he's just so willing to make jokes about lenin this and off to the gulag to you that and he's just like pouring out endless things that just you can't really follow the thread and and i think that that's the point he's a performative philosopher who is essentially saying in a zen-like kind of way good luck figure out my koans because they're just going to lead you to the conclusion that i never tried to make sense what would it mean to make sense, right? Sense is a thing that's appearing right now, here, there.

Starting point is 01:42:27 If I said something five minutes ago and you're holding me to this now, well, then you're obviously a philogocentrist this and off to the gulag to you. You know, like it's just, it's complete. What the heck, right? And I think it's done on purpose, you know? And Lacan, who Zizek is a disciple of, Lacan said that. That's what Lacan said to do. He was like, this is highly performative. You want to create a master-slave, you've got to pivot. You've got to turn. And you've got to turn in ways that are convenient to the moment,

Starting point is 01:43:07 convenient to whatever's happening. And that's what Zizek just does. And he does it large scale in front of lots and lots of people. And it's never going to come to a point because it's too Zen in its nature. It's too master-slave relationship in its nature to have a point because there isn't one, right? Is there something wrong with the master-slave relationship uh in lakhan uh i the reason why i'm saying this is because it seems

Starting point is 01:43:33 like some of the jumping off point is to say that door one or door two door one would lead you to a master-slave relationship master-slave is wrong so therefore door two is the option i don't know if i'm understanding that correctly but i do hear that in lakhan and and i don't know much about zizek other than he's inscrutable to me and i need to pay attention some more because i would love to talk to him for this podcast can't seem to get a hold of him though either way i would love to talk to him and i'm curious is there something to be avoided about this master slave relationship and is there something to be avoided about this master-slave relationship and is there something to be is is it laudable so is it both to be avoided to be lauded i don't know at the end of the day but what i do know is that that idea that you would willfully take on a potentially

Starting point is 01:44:21 destructive viewpoint has has a it's a flavor in psychology like if you look at anti-psychiatry with thomas zaz and all that sort of stuff um it's very difficult because basically psychoanalysis i should rather say but i think zaz was anti-psychiatry was the term that he used there um but i mean i went through through psychoanalysis myself, so I'm not just sort of like jamming on it out of nowhere. But the guy that I went through psychoanalysis with, he was much more Freudian in the sense of creating a symbolic father figure. And that symbolic figure needed a certain amount of symbolic behavior on my part in order for it to function as the symbolic father right

Starting point is 01:45:05 in lacanian terms this would be big s over little s and in zizek's terms this would be the big other sort of thing now the difference is is that lacan will be like a joker just like throwing stuff out like wild experiments because knowing you're going to die, zero sum game. So, you know, if you're going to be lost in fantasy, you'd better learn earlier that the fantasy is often a lot more pleasurable than the reality. And you, you know, build some filters that help you figure that out. And I'll just play whatever role you need me to play in this moment. No truth, because what would truth mean? Truth is just the thing that's appearing in you now. You're always stuck in the now. You're going to make decisions based on biological imperatives, et cetera, et cetera. So we'll just play a game, you and I. I'll be the master according to your

Starting point is 01:45:53 position as a slave right now. I think that that's not great at the end of the day, if you ask me personally. But it's there. It's in the world, right? It's a flavor. And some people adopt it for whatever reasons. And I think that people who are psychoanalyzed by Lacan or in a Lacanian thread, they're much more likely to wind up like a Zizek figure, which is a little bit wild, unhinged, shooting from the hip, but very aware that that's exactly what they're doing. And knowing that or thinking that part of their healing is precisely because that that's the way they're operating right because that was that's what it means to be fully psychoanalyzed

Starting point is 01:46:29 in the lacanian sense okay in the sense that i was psychoanalyzed this is a little bit different so for slavoy you think that he's aware that he isn't making sense to the regular person or to the standard observer i feel confident that i can make that uh statement because he himself has talked about zen a lot right and so you can read books or this is in interviews with him published interviews in books where he reflects on zen its role in both lucanian psychoanalysis, in Derrida. Okay, so let's imagine he's doing that. I don't have any objections to that. Let's imagine he's doing that.

Starting point is 01:47:13 And the reason he's doing that is because it's healing in some manner, or because why? That I don't know. You've got to ask him. Because you mentioned healing just a second ago. You mentioned that through this process of critiquing it all or showing that it's all not foolish but that it's all a joke in some manner that that heals well it can heal i mean that's the that's the thing in in the psychoanalytic frame it's thought that just something about the psychoanalytic frame itself is healing, or even just the therapeutic frame. The very symbolic act of entering a theater in which healing is said to occur is supposedly going to be healing at some level. Now, obviously, this is not the case, but that's part of the, or it doesn't have to be the case because,

Starting point is 01:48:00 you know, the theater of being in a symbolic healing situation, they can still give you a drug that causes you to jump off a bridge, you know, because that's what the consequence of some drugs do. So, you know, I find it quite dangerous and quite strange. And by the way, I'm just saying what I think. I don't know that these things are true necessarily about Zizek, and I have spent a lot of time in a room with him. So it's partly a... Yeah. I'm a witness to witnesses. The reason I was asking was only because

Starting point is 01:48:31 it sounds like Lacan... Well, Lacan, I believe, is a postmodernist. I don't even know what postmodernism means, you know. I do, but I don't. Yeah, yeah, okay. In the sense that he doesn't believe that there are any truths. No, I don't think that that's what I would say.

Starting point is 01:48:48 I think... Okay. So my take on all of this is that postmodernism is a very weird word that somehow has been taken from art and then been applied to what's called poststructuralism. I don't know if I'm correct about that, but I find it very strange to hear anybody being called a post-modernist, even though I do know that people use it that way. I just don't know why, because post-modernism is like when you put red on a wall and then you say, that's going to cause you to reflect on all sorts of things about the nature of art because, you know, it's a reference to redness as such. And oh yeah, yeah, which fine

Starting point is 01:49:23 by me, that sounds like a great mental exercise and it is post-modern because modernism painted in a particular way yeah you correctly pointed out when you watch the documentary better left unsaid as a little plug better left unsaid is a documentary i was directing great thank you thank you i appreciate it about the extreme left what makes the extreme left extreme and then we touch on the right as well you can watch that at better left unsaid film.com when i sent it to you you correctly pointed out that modernism is different than modernity and i conflated those two in the film that was slightly well it was both an accident then on purpose the reason it's an accident was just because i made that mistake and then the

Starting point is 01:50:04 reason it's on purpose is that that's how people use the term and so that's why i put a little subtitle at the bottom and i said when i say modernism i mean modernity which is the philosophical strain that comes up after and they after the enlightenment or that precipitated the enlightenment okay anyway now that you have that yes you're making a difference a distinction between the artistic post-modernism and the philosophical well i think it's important because if there's one thing that these post-modernists have in common is that they wildly throw around words and they just use them in in way they recast words and whether they're right or wrong to do so i don't i can't be the judge of that but it is it is exactly that sort of being the joker, just throwing stuff out there and, you know, not really having some

Starting point is 01:50:46 sort of compass or, or foundation to which all these things point and just playing a wild game. And so truth, it's not, I don't think it's the case that they don't think truth exists. It's just factuality is contingent. And that is the premise of science, right? It is factual based on evidence, but that is contingent upon its falsifiability and the appearance of new evidence, right? So often in the atheist world, you'll hear people say, well, the time to believe in something is when there's evidence that substantiates the claim sufficient to us believing in it. But that in itself kind of folds in on itself, given what science is, because science is itself contingent upon not only falsifiability, but the idea that we will test and retest and continue to build the profile, so to speak.

Starting point is 01:51:39 And mathematically, and this is where the quote-unquote postmodernisms, modernist people go a little bit wild because they're like, yeah, mathematically, exponentially, everything is completely, you know, going to be unproven because the burden of evidence will or whatever. Right. Like they just play these kinds of exponential games and they do that with language itself. So language exponentially is going to fall apart because it is contingent on the present use, our use right now, and words are going to change over time, etc. At least that's how I understand a lot of that stuff. So it's not that truth doesn't exist. It's just that truth is often contingent upon its use, which is the problem with fake news, which we see all the time. all the time, you know, is that the truth is just constantly being thrown out and used in a utilitarian sort of way in order to achieve a short-term goal that then has these long-term ramifications and then can be easily rewritten because the container is language, which is

Starting point is 01:52:39 itself already so malleable, right? Images are so malleable. And now we're seeing this, whatever those words and images that are stored in this or that data bank or database can also just be either erased or you can be prevented from being able to visit it at all, right? Which is very risky and dangerous and sad and strange. But, you know, that does cause us to reflect on what is true and what could be true, especially when we acknowledge that the hypothetical claims that we make about reality are contingent upon evidence that either confirms or denies those hypotheses. Anyway, back to psychoanalysis. I just, I was never psychoanalyzed in the Lacanian strain, but that's what I understand about it. And I think that it has a kind of chaos magic

Starting point is 01:53:35 element. I mean, that's not the right term, but sort of like willful chaos introduced into it because randomness is thought to just be better in the end because you're dealing with randomness anyway so if you can deal with it in a therapeutic frame and the master is pivoting to be the master that you need in that moment then it should theoretically help you to see the game and then be able to translate the game that you've seen into the real world and in a lakonian sense be able to deal with the fundamental fact that fantasy is always better than the game that you've seen into the real world and in a Lacanian sense, be able to deal with the fundamental fact that fantasy is always better than the reality. So you better learn quickly, as quickly as possible to deal with reality as it is and

Starting point is 01:54:14 enjoy your fantasies and pay the price for having them, which is, I don't know, that's what it is. What it is. Assuming my analysis there is even remotely correct. But that's how I've come to understand it. What was it like to be a student of Slavoj Žižek? It was interesting. So European Graduate School operated in an interesting way. So most of the year is offline and you do your own reading.

Starting point is 01:54:40 Or sorry, it's online. And you do your own reading. And then you meet for six weeks every summer, and you have these seminars basically every day for just the hour equivalent that would be pretty much close to a normal semester. So you spend a lot of time real fast with these people. And that's great because it's super compressed.

Starting point is 01:55:03 But you don't have that much time, but you don't have that much time for, you don't have that much time for, what do they call it? You know, defragging your mind, percolating. It's tough, but it's fun. And, you know, the promise of European graduate school is it lets you have these professors that you're normally not ever going to be able to have, like Zizek. When he was alive, I think Derrida taught there. Lots of people. I had Peter Greenaway, the filmmaker, as a professor, which was the most amazing thing ever. So it's a really cool program.

Starting point is 01:55:41 I think they're in Malta now, but at that time they were in Switzerland. So it's a really cool program. I think they're in Malta now, but at that time they were in Switzerland. When we talked about zero consciousness and we were mentioning quantities of consciousness that one can't, either that's not useful or it's not true to say that some medicant monk has more consciousness than us. Then I was wondering, well, is there such a concept of zero consciousness? What do you think of that? Do some objects have zero consciousness? Is zero consciousness a property of the world anywhere?

Starting point is 01:56:10 What would that look like? Yeah, I don't know. I like a thing in Nietzsche. It's a small little thing, but basically it says everything interprets. And so what you could take that to mean is that everything that exists interprets the forces of gravity, of entropy or whatever that's acting upon it, right? So it's not really literally interpreting anything, but it has to deal with those forces.

Starting point is 01:56:39 But whether it has consciousness or not, I don't know. I mean, this is where the non-dualists who take physics and, you know, am I a wave, am I a particle, or all this stuff, is everything a wave function? I kind of get to your third question, which is, so what? What changes if that proposition is true? What changes if it isn't? That's not the non-duality I'm talking about. I'm talking, you know, just everything's a wave and so forth. Yeah, great.

Starting point is 01:57:04 If that's the case, if you can provide evidence for it, which I don't think any of them really can. I haven't seen, I mean, I've seen that they provide evidence, but that evidence doesn't have that. So what, you know, big bang. It's not compelling enough. Have you heard of Thomas Campbell? Have you read of read Thomas Campbell's My Big Toe? I haven't, no. Okay, forget about that. So anyway, you were saying that, what is the point? You're getting to point number three. Yeah. Well, if you take Nietzsche's Everything Interprets,

Starting point is 01:57:32 well, I think that the point is quite nice. You know that it's a zero-sum game. You've got now. Maybe you're cursed to repeat the same day over and over and over again. And you can ask yourself, if I'm cursed to repeat the same day over and over again knowing that i don't get to solve the puzzle of whether you know i'm an illusion or not knowing that the future is an image that appears in you now what would that day look like

Starting point is 01:57:56 if you were cursed and then you can set up the game so that because you are cursed to live the same day every day right because you're a biological unit that has to eat, you have to go to the washroom, you have to suffer the oncoming rush of age, you have to suffer the fact that you can't control others, hell is other people, as Sartre famously said, yada, yada, yada. So if you could design, if you could be an artist that interacts with it, what would you do? And this is where I think the non-duality I'm talking about is a little bit more powerful, which is to say, well, hell, all this stuff is appearing. As far as I can tell, it's appearing in me. And I have all these pressures upon me, but these pressures have rules. The market has rules. The internet has rules. And if I'm able

Starting point is 01:58:41 to identify those rules and interact with them in such a way that they enable me to build a game so that I don't feel hell every day. And every day is like much more fulfilling than the day, you know, not knowing what's going to come. And I can just be in that day, do whatever I'm doing in that day. Some days I'm not going to be as good as others. I might have a cold. My wife might be sick, yada, yada, yada. But I still have this system that provides pretty much that the curse of being cursed to live the same day every day is the best possible day given all the laws that govern reality. So that's the so what to me. And I think that those people are creating a great contribution by using their time on earth

Starting point is 01:59:26 to create ideas that stimulate thought and so forth but I haven't seen the big so what from them and maybe I'm not reading them close enough but they seem to be creating enemies that aren't there like materialism like where where are the people in the street marching saying you know oh well we've got to treat every object as not having consciousness. Yes, I know there are people who are fighting for things that people don't want, like abortion and rights and et cetera, et cetera. And that are, those are some of those implications there, but I don't see them having any solution to that by saying, well, you know, the scalpel too is conscious. I mean, so what if it is?

Starting point is 02:00:05 What changes if that's right? Nothing as far as I can tell changes. What changes if it's wrong? Well, nothing as far as I can tell because you're not going to be able to stop people from writing those ideas or sharing those ideas. So build a system in your life so that you are as content as possible to show up.

Starting point is 02:00:23 And if you can help people along the way, that's great. And that is a so what, because the evidence will be there. Anthony, to get a bit philosophical and to play devil's advocate, what would happen if someone said, my ideal life is causing misery to others. Some people's are. One may question whether or not that's fulfilling and then have a distinction between momentary happiness and fulfillment or purpose or whatever. Let's not get that specific.

Starting point is 02:00:53 Let's imagine that they are imbued with meaning when they harm others. And they say that this is my life that I would put on repeat. It's me harming others. So then what is the ethical action there? Because it seems like they're fulfilling that circle of repetition of the day, like Groundhog Day. It's a real problem. My uncle was a criminologist, and he trained police guards guards and they deal with that question every day. There are people who not only are content to be in prison, but they actually see prison as the

Starting point is 02:01:34 place where they even get to exercise their ill intent even more, right? And they just see the rules that govern that reality and they use it to exercise their evil intent inside of that. So I don't necessarily have an observation for it or an answer to it, but it is in reality. It does exist. And I think that if you're able to somehow get involved in studying that and figuring it out, you could contribute to the betterment of the future for those who are either blessed or cursed, depending on how they look at it, to be in that future. Because there's almost certainly human brains, and those brains are governed by rules. And some of those people, it's not just Sam Harris, you know, free will and luck and fortune and chance. It's also chance

Starting point is 02:02:22 meeting biology, or at least so it seems to me. And so the amygdala, for example, can be eroded in certain individuals that causes them not only not care, but to crave, you know, violent acts against others. And we might be able to do something about that. But we need people who are passionate about that. I happen to have an uncle who was passionate about that and worked on it and published on it and trained guards to help them be better guards in those situations and so on and so forth. And I think we can do a lot about it, but at the end of the day, we got to look at it honestly. And we have to say, this is biology meeting chance and fate and circumstance. And now that they've done this, you know, what can we learn from it?

Starting point is 02:03:03 What can we potentially do? This comes back to, you know, the intelligence question. Can we create, without creating more suffering, because it almost certainly is going to in the beginning, can we create a world in which people are on the same page about ethical matters, knowing that the very meat that processes ethical matters has scarcity. It has all kinds of laws that drive it to behave, to fulfill things in this moment without much thought for the future. That's what it's designed to do, right? Can we do that? And can we do it in a way that, you know, is going to work? We don't know, but we're here, so obviously some people are going to try. And I'd lean on let's put our heads together and do it as right as possible. But prepare to fail.

Starting point is 02:04:00 I'm curious. Let's imagine that people are these irrational robots. And I'm not sure that that is the correct way of understanding people. But let's imagine them in this computational sense to be a black box. It's not a computer. It's irrational in a sense. So we need to feed it. If we fed it what was was rational what would be outputted would be completely irrational because that's the way irrationality works so then that means we need to feed it something of equal or opposite irrationality if what we want to be outputted is something positive then what i'm wondering is let's take an atheist like sam harris and let's imagine sam harris believes that we are irrational beings which doesn't seem like that's too much of a stretch would what would you say i know i'm speaking to sam harris in my head but what would you say anthony if someone said religion now as for which religion like i'm putting question marks on that or if it's

Starting point is 02:05:03 an existing religion putting question marks maybe it. Or if it's an existing religion, putting question marks. Maybe it's an amended. Maybe it's a different kind. That religion is the, this irrational religion is this paper that we feed into these irrational beings called humans that allow them to work with one another. Is that okay? Or do you still see like, no, no, no. We have to be guided by what is absolutely true. And what is true is that

Starting point is 02:05:25 there are no gods and there are no god i mean there is no god and so on and christianity is false and buddhism is false and so so do we take this scientific view that says and to straw man science to straw man science would that says that jesus is false and buddha buddha is false and all religions are simply myths generated by irrational people to quell themselves or because that was the best they could do at the time did we take that round and say we should feed into these irrational beings the truth which is hey man you're deluded or should we feed them these irrational quote-unquote stories of the Bible or the Vedic text and have them get together and cooperate and produce something akin to peace or

Starting point is 02:06:14 something salutary. So what would you say? Where I would start is look at what Sam Harris does, not what he says, right? And what I mean by that, I wish that I would have saved it. Maybe I can go back through my AMAs or whatever and find it to correct my own memory if it needs correcting. But I remember an AMA for his supporters back in the day where people were asking him, what were the spiritual texts that you studied? And, you know, tell us some of them. And he said, I don't want to tell you what these spiritual texts are, because I'm concerned that people are going to go and, you know, wildly misinterpret them, this, that, and the other. I see that danger, because I've memorized a lot of that stuff,

Starting point is 02:06:55 and it's a bit of a mind twist to get around it and get to uber-atheism, which is what I think is in them, right? But it's got a lot of spiritual verbiage that can make you think there's a God. And that's not really, it's not that simple. And it isn't that, that is not the conclusion. But this is years ago. And he says, look, I'll give you one name, right? And he mentions, I believe if my memory is correct, he mentions Eduardo Vedanta. And I was so kind of, I mean, love sam harris fan etc etc but i was a little bit disgusted by this because here's this guy who has commands this massive audience and he's going to police the knowledge and say okay if you're going to study this here's like a little nugget for you but i'm not going to tell you all the texts that I studied. When he's happy to tell you like all the science texts, et cetera, et cetera. And he's got like massive book recommendations.

Starting point is 02:07:50 Now, skip forward a couple of years. The Waking Up app appears. And now he's got Adyashanti as a guest teacher who's just going to say all this stuff that he wasn't willing to say. And he put gates on before. And I'm not judging him or anything. I'm just saying rather than what he says that we should do, look at what he does, right? Which is, you know, I don't know what it all is going to culminate to. But rather than having, you know, Sam Harris meditate with me live sort of settings where you meet with him at, you know, a mass convention, and you're all one

Starting point is 02:08:20 together, and so forth. He's got an app, which is a meditation app that is built inside of a device that is designed to interrupt you, right? That's your meditation app. And then it's filled with content that directly contradicts his years of suppressing the spiritual texts that he didn't want people to have that is now wildly espousing them. And I just scratched my head a little bit about this, because, you know, doesn't he have the faith that human people can figure it out for themselves, and so forth? And I mean, I did. I wanted to know. I mean, what is it that you're reading? It is just like suppressed, suppressed, suppressed. And then he just throws out this one nugget on one AMA. And then years later, all of a sudden he's got Adyashanti and like other people

Starting point is 02:09:05 in this spiritual world as if like what changed. So what my point is here is not to vilify Sam Harris or anything like that, but rather just to say, they're saying one thing, doing another. And why? That's the question. Why? And it's because we all do. We all do. So when you say, should we do this? Should we do that? I think we we're still not as humans all together that there is a we that could do anything that we should do. Right. And I'm not sure that the consequences of there being enough of us on the same page are going to be worth having. But that's what our technology is building. We're like, if you look at like a Douglas Hofstadter kind of Gödel Escher Bach looking things, we're ants. You know, we don't, we're communicating something. We're building something. Do we know what it is that we're building?

Starting point is 02:09:55 I don't think so, but we are building. Why? Because back to Nietzsche, everything interprets. We are the scientists. Whether we are, whether we realize that we're doing scientific experiments or not, humanity as such is collaborating to do something to an end that is an image in our consciousness now that can't possibly have convergence across the board and can't ever possibly become what we might imagine that it would become because we don't even agree on it.

Starting point is 02:10:23 So we got to step back and just think if there's a way to do anything at all and just think, you know, what can we do now knowing that we are driven by forces that are contrary to even the words that come out of our mouths to create that day that, you know, we would be happily cursed to live in. And I think we are collaborating together on things, whether we are aware that we're collaborating or not. Everything we're saying right now is being recorded because we intentionally record it. But you'd better believe that it's being recorded,

Starting point is 02:10:56 whether we record it or not. There's machines that are reading human language as we speak to try to figure out what humans are. And what we should do is just not clear to me at all because we are doing something we don't have to do anything that's that's that is ultimately what what the sam harris that's the implications of what sam harris is espousing you couldn't do it if even if you tried because you already have forces acting upon you. And if you're lucky enough to have heard of the Waking Up app, well, good luck, good fortune.

Starting point is 02:11:32 And hopefully you will figure out what those books are that he read if you wanted to and you didn't have to sort, sift and screen and search forever because you got a gatekeeper, right? Because the great promise of the internet was to get rid of the damn gatekeepers. But then what did it do do it ultimately ended up being populated with more gatekeepers than we ever

Starting point is 02:11:49 could have you know imagined you know so what are we doing that's what i would just ask not only what is it that all this is going on but who who exactly is it appearing to who do you who is who are who is this person you think you are that it's appearing to? And whether Sam Harris is right that there is no I or that the I is just an illusion, you got to go one step further, which is that to whom is that appearing to? Right? Which is, I don't know the answer, but I've worked it out for myself and I keep working it out for myself. It's the most fascinating adventure. It's like if you want to working it out for myself. It's the most fascinating adventure. It's like if you want to get out of the matrix,

Starting point is 02:12:28 that's the way, is to ask the question constantly. Train your memory to constantly bring it back to you. To whom is this even happening? Do you believe in free will? No, but I tend not to believe in anything. Why would you believe in things? If it's true, what do you need to believe in it for? There's no evidence that there's free will, so I don't see anything to believe in. And if it were true, I wouldn't need to believe in it.

Starting point is 02:12:56 Okay, what does it mean to believe? Well, in that sense of the word belief, you know, it would be like, and this is where, you know, some Lacanian psychoanalysis is useful. Because some people, they create a kind of symbolic big other, right? Like mathematicians, for example. They will say, no, no, math is not invented. Math is discovered, right? And so then when they discover it, rather than seeing that, yes, it's both discovered and invented, I mean, assuming that's true, I don't know, but I'm just sort of pointing out a debate that's in the world. But there are a lot of people who mathematically

Starting point is 02:13:37 believe in, or sorry, they believe in science, right? They believe in it, and they act symbolically in science, right? They believe in it, and they act symbolically as if it were a god, right? And that's where they are very against themselves so often, because they're not looking at the implications of if that math was true, then why would they act that way, right? So they believe in it, but they don't act as they believe in it yeah i'm not following so for example when you say that this that science becomes a god and they act as if science is a god what are you referring to i'm not i'm not saying that they think that science is a god or that they act as if a science is god i'm saying that there's a symbolic there's there's a symbolic entity that is being treated symbolically as somehow a big other kind of thing.

Starting point is 02:14:29 And they're not aware of that symbolic relationship that they have to it. I'm going to think about a specific example with a friend of mine. Yeah, sure. So, for example, Google is a great god for him. And we did some Google ads one time. And he said, well, if we just look at this and we do recursion that and mathematical formula this, if you spend this much on ads, then this should exactly work, right? And I said, okay, we'll run the experiment. That's fine.

Starting point is 02:15:00 And he was like 100% sure of this. So we did all the symbolic behaviors because the math told us that this is what would happen, right? But that's not what happened. It was just a loss. And then I was having a discussion with him and I said, something's wrong with your math, right?

Starting point is 02:15:19 Because the math here showed that after a certain amount compound this and that, then this would be in the, in the black, but we're, we're deep in the red. And he defended the math like crazy. And he then, you know, started to, started to show me, he said, just, just let me show you. And he got a piece of paper and he wrote out the formulas, right? Now, what I'm saying is instead of just saying, you know what? I don't know what's wrong but it didn't work he then started to symbolically behave as if you could write out the formula and that would somehow

Starting point is 02:15:54 cause me to convert to believe that that math was yeah i understand okay okay okay so when you say sorry let me see if i'm understanding it because if i I say it. But you see this a bit in, you see that exact symbolic behavior all the time. So I'm not saying that people believe in math as if it's a god or anything. But there's a symbolic behavior as if there was this sort of thing. That it's eternally true. But eternity, like if you look at Julian julian barber i think his name is like eternity he's just like what are you talking about like how is this even possible sorry i'm interrupting you go ahead he's this guy's a guest on the podcast at some point right right and

Starting point is 02:16:35 barbers okay well i think that part of the issue with people like sam harris and the and people who call themselves atheists or even uber atheists or whatever it may be is obviously i'm being a bit of a joker myself with that yeah yeah is the issue of what does it mean to be god so i think they have let's take sam harris and daniel dennett as examples so the new atheists i think that they have and please don't think that i'm denigrating atheism per se i'm not calling myself an atheist or a theist i would say that i don't know i don't i don't i i'm i'm i'm unsure they have this idea that god yeah they have this idea that god is this old man in the sky that can that tells you what to do and the people who believe in god are those who are will follow whatever god says no matter what and are staunched about them being correct in their interpretation of what god is however there are people like i'm not sure if this is aquinas or

Starting point is 02:17:37 not or if this even predates him but people who say that look the world god you mentioned that we follow the math and the person was saying that well look the math says this it should be so the world is wrong in a sense in that example well i think it was aquinas or someone who predates him that said that god is the way that we investigate the bible let's imagine this is the bible to some people this probably is the bible let's imagine this is and we say okay we think that this means that god created the earth in seven days however if we investigate the natural world god created the natural world in this cosmology and we find out that humans evolved from chimpanzees from a common ancestor with chimpanzees and so on and it was millions and billions and so on of years well the bible isn't

Starting point is 02:18:23 wrong it's our interpretation of the Bible that's wrong because the world is the way the world is. And I don't see Sam Harris or Daniel Dennett or any of the new atheists tackling with that. Instead, they do what I think is a straw man argument as to what religion is. In a sense, they take the people from the New Borough Baptist Church, I believe,

Starting point is 02:18:44 the people who are against homosexuals and so on, and creationists and so on. They take them as representative of all religion or of all that God is meant to be. But there are huge interdictions against stating exactly what God is. Now, one might say that's like a huge cop-out because you want to say that God exists, but at the same time, you don't want to define what God is. But that's not that much of a cop-out because many people who are materialists, we don't think materialism is a cop-out,

Starting point is 02:19:22 but materialists would say that, I don't know exactly what is because epistemically, we don't think materialism is a cop-out but materialists would say that i don't know exactly what is because epistemically we can't know we can only assume that there is something independent of us and we interact with it okay well you're saying there is something that exists but we have no clue as to what it exactly is like donald hoffman might say donald hoffman's not a materialist but you understand i don't i don't see it as any more of a cop-out. So when people say, yes, this is what religion is, this is what God is, and God is not true, or God doesn't exist, to me it's like, well, what are you defining as God, and why do you think that that represents what God actually is? Now, I understand the critique that someone may have, and it's the critique that occurs to me, or would have occurred to me as an atheist a few years ago, which is that it's just

Starting point is 02:20:06 so vague. And what is the use of any of this? Well, there is use. I can get to some of the use later. But either way, the whole point is to say, when people are saying God doesn't exist, I don't know if they are properly grappling with the issue using the different definitions of God, which, by the way, there shouldn't be a definition of God according to some of the scriptural accounts. You shouldn't try to define God. In fact, God is what eludes definitions. There's much I'd like to say, but I'm assuming that you understand where I'm going with this. So what are your thoughts?

Starting point is 02:20:47 What occurs to you when I say this? Well, I would just kind of like point us back to my claim that we should look at what Sam Harris does, not what he says, right? Because his behaviors are somehow against themselves or against itself in terms of, you know, well, we want to restrict people from having these woo-woo ideas, but, you know, my app is doing really great. So why don't we get a bunch of people in there who have all these woo-woo ideas and, you know, we'll get their

Starting point is 02:21:19 audiences too, right? So what is he doing there? Now he's acting symbolically towards the way the market works right so that i didn't quite get to that point when i was going through the what he does rather than what he says thing right because new atheism evolved as it did the way many things do because the market was responding to it right and then it it peaked and then it started to fizzle out and now a new thing comes right so? So I hope I'm not copying. Spirituality wave. Yeah, yeah. I hope I'm not copying out by just going in this direction,

Starting point is 02:21:51 but I think that this is the answer. What is the behavior that's going on? And how is that either literally, I often use this word symbolic behavior, but like how word symbolic behavior, but like, how, how is that behavior? What is that behavior saying about the thing that says there is a God in the first place? I mean, are cows going around talking about God? Are fish talking about God? No, it's humans that are talking about God, right? So part of the answer to this, and Spinoza, I think, is a great person to study on this, you know, who's talking about God? Well, Spinoza is, and he's aware of this, right?

Starting point is 02:22:26 And so he then starts to think about, well, ethical behavior and this, that, and could you live forever? And he comes up with these solutions to, you know, that. And he says, well, basically, you are going to live forever at some level, because as long as there are humans, which are information storage and retrieval devices, then part of the information that passed through you is also going to pass through them. So stop worrying about it. You know, your eternal nature is already secured so long as there are humans through which information can be stored and

Starting point is 02:22:58 retrieved. And I think that that's the answer in many, many ways, or I feel that that's the answer to the question of does God exist or not? Who's talking about it? How are they talking about it? And in what ways is there congruence between what they're saying and what they're doing, right? Because there's a lack of congruence all across the board, including in myself. And that's what you would predict from humans. So, you know, take it or leave it, but that's, that's my answer to the God question. Who's having it, how are they behaving and where's the congruence in what they're saying and what they're doing? Speaking on free will, I heard you say that there's no evidence for free will, but I know, well, there's no evidence for your existence either. There's no evidence for free will but i know well there's no evidence for your

Starting point is 02:23:45 existence either there's no evidence that you're conscious there's no evidence that i don't think is the case let's say let's talk about free will and i don't understand why people are so adamant about that free will exists or that it doesn't exist i mean i understand it to some degree because people even like even daniel dennett would say that free will hinges on responsibility or responsibility depends on free will and so on but regardless of that there are extremely extremely bright neuroscientists for example the world's most preeminent neuroscientist his name is carl friston he has the most citations he has an h index of over 200 over 200 as an h index brilliant brilliant scientists don't have over 100 like it's hard to get over 50 of it on an h index he has over 200 anyway even he is like well and he's a neuroscientist even he says there is free will may exist and he has a model for free

Starting point is 02:24:40 will nicholas jessen who's a a quantum physicist without appealing to the quantum nature of consciousness like some people do. He says you can't disprove free will in the same way that you can't disprove that real numbers or integers are properties of matter. I know that sounds a bit technical, but there is an association there. Either way, I don't know how people can take one side of that issue. It's so contentious, and it's not as if there's overwhelming evidence one way or the other. So either way, whatever. I want to hear, what do you think about that? Well, I think it's easy to evidence why there's no free will as such, but we've got to define our terms, right? Because there's a difference between acts of will and free will, as it's often discussed, which is, you know, nuanced what exactly is meant there. But notice something here, and this is an

Starting point is 02:25:31 answer to the free will question. You wanted to make sure, and please don't be offended if I use you as an example, but I do this myself all the time too. 200 citations. 200 citations, right? Now, why would a human go out of their way to couch a presentation of something in that? Well, that's because we symbolically, I would use that word, we symbolically imbue value on things by our training. So when we talk about free will, I would say that that is part of the evidence of the absence of free will, because that is something you've seen other people do. That is something I've seen other people do. It's something I've done myself. This is the guy, right, because he's got 200 publications. are playing out theatrical and you know grammatical and rhetorical patterns in the same way a jazz musician trains themselves not not to like invent in the

Starting point is 02:26:35 moment but they just have this code of licks that they are just super tiled into and they know what key they're in and they just rip right because that's what we're doing we're jamming right now We're jazzing and riffing. But the idea that we're doing it of our own free volition is just patently false. We're using a language that we didn't invent that was drilled into us because we were exposed to it. We didn't have any choice in, I was born in British Columbia, you know, wherever individuals were born. I don't know. You know, I just was there. That's the language I got. And so that's the one that I encoded. That's the one I riff with. Whatever comes out,

Starting point is 02:27:15 comes out based on a certain fitness with that language. But I didn't choose any of it, right? I didn't choose for YouTube to, you know, some time ago, show me your channel, the Richard Heyer things come up. I didn't choose to be interested in memory. It just was thrust upon me. It's not exactly Heideggerian geworfenheit or, you know, being thrown into the world, but in some sense, that's what we are. So yes, there are all kinds of little ways to talk about acts of will and how that we have agency to act in the world. But overall, and I think this is where I think a lot of people miss, and I don't even think that Sam Harris is necessarily doing that good of a job on it, but there's the finesse here. What we're talking about is essentially being thrown into the world and not having much to say about it.

Starting point is 02:27:59 I can walk out this morning, it's morning here in Australia, I can go to the cafe and get hit by a bus, I don't I don't have nearly as much I might be as cautious as I want to be I can look left I can look right and a rock can still fall from the sky so you know so much is contingent upon chance that the notion of of me having much choice in in what I ate three days ago in a 72-hour cycle, not causing me to go ballistic and do some crazy stuff. And I have a mental illness, right? I mean, it's just, where's the free will in any of this? I'm a biological unit who has somehow become aware of being a biological unit. And I'm strapped to the meat tube. Here's what occurs to me when I hear that.

Starting point is 02:28:47 What you've demonstrated is only constraints or influence. So, for example, the books on the shelf behind you, though they're fake because it's an image, it doesn't matter, whatever. It's a print screen. Right, right, exactly. Okay, so imagine one of those books fell and you say, well, it didn't have the free will to fall because, first of all, it didn't choose itself to be a book. Second of all, it didn't choose itself to be a book second of all it wasn't it didn't choose which shelf it was on okay but all of that just demonstrates that there are constraints placed not that there's a complete lack of free will and as for the the heavy heavy heavy heavy

Starting point is 02:29:17 99.99999999 percent influence of the world over your own actions. That's true. Now there could be 0.000000 with the 35 zeros and then a one. Even if you choose that little one, somehow choose, it's not clear what choose means because we get into notions of causation. How do you cause one? How does one self cause oneself? How does one cause oneself one's self? How does one cause one's action? That's not easy. But not to get into quantum physics or to pretend that quantum physics is the answer. I'm only using quantum physics as an analogy to demonstrate that it's possible that there... You can think of a particle.

Starting point is 02:30:03 Now, this is maybe personifying a bit too much, but you can think of a particle. Now this is maybe personifying a bit too much, but you can think of a particle, let's say one that decays. Okay, let's say, how do you know when it's going to decay? Does it choose when to decay? We don't know the answer to that. We don't imbue uranium with a personality, but you can think of it in a sense of free will. There's someone named Nicholas Jessen.

Starting point is 02:30:24 He says that science presupposes free will as well. So if you're going to invalidate free will based on a scientific framework, you can't because you presuppose free will in the formulation of science. How? Because you have to stand outside and freely choose your experiment as a scientist in order to uncorrelate yourself from the data. Otherwise, all your data is completely corrupted. If, if I know that every time, look, there's a red light behind me. If, if all, if my looking there causes the red light or looking at the screen causes the red light, I can't say that that red light exists. So there has to be some independent quality of myself and

Starting point is 02:31:01 my, and the data. So that's another reason why i don't know if one can use science to invalidate free will when it presupposes it to begin with and and you mentioned these constraints and that's 100 correct there are constraints there are by the way i'm not arguing free will exists just so you know i'm just saying that i don't i i don't understand i see something that they're to be to be frank when i hear some people adamantly say that free will exists or if free will doesn't exist i have the sneaking suspicion that they have some other psychological motivation to say so or that they have already come to that conclusion and now they're justifying it the reason i say that is

Starting point is 02:31:46 because it's such a difficult issue why would you be so why would you take one side or the other like the more you study it the more you realize there's absolute conflict and people like sam harris have podcasts about no there's uniformity in the neuroscientific community about free will not no there absolutely isn't even people like like i mentioned carl carl friston and and anil seth and you also mentioned well courage you're you're being you're being wide-eyed and bushy-tailed about collegiate collegiate approval and like with the citations and so on that is true in a sense although we do when evaluating the scientific experiments that invalidate supposedly invalidate free will

Starting point is 02:32:32 we also do that so in the invalidation of free will there is still the use of this tool that you say i've lost my train of thought. Hopefully you can pick up the cards that I've just thrown on the floor. Yeah, well, look, I'm all for it too. And I love to read these things and go through the ideas and so forth. I haven't really decided. I've just said I don't see compelling evidence that there's free will. But I'm open to all kinds of evidence. But in the free will, as I mean it, I still don't see evidence of it. Rather,

Starting point is 02:33:10 I see the opposite. Because part of the free will is, could you go back and change what you did, right? And that's not possible because the past is an image inside of you. And, or, you know, it's a memory inside of you. And you can go back and change memories, that's for sure. But your very memory is already corrupt. So you talked about data corruption, you know, it's a memory inside of you, and you can go back and change memories, that's for sure. But your very memory is already corrupt. So you talked about data corruption, you know, like standing outside of it, and that would corrupt your data. Hold on. Data is always already stored somehow. It's all, maybe not always, but it's, you know, not exactly as pure as one would make it and so forth. And then in our own memories, we don't even know that we remembered what we remembered as accurately as we could, right? So in that sort of thing of like, hey, look at how science, you know, we use this language, 200 sort of stuff, 200 publications,

Starting point is 02:33:57 and that means... Yeah, it was H index, but yeah. But that's, to me, that again comes back to the core sort of thing I wish we would focus more on as humans, which is if the scholarly sort of approach is going to have any kind of weight to it, then there is this notion that we have to accept that truth is not only somewhat contingent upon change because new data changes it, but we also have to accept that there are tribal battles and that humans behave in symbolic ways in order to win those tribal battles. So what Harris is doing when he says, oh, there's absolute convergence on this topic in the neuroscientific community, that's symbolic behavior. That is a battle cry. That is propaganda. That is no different than the ancient Hebrews writing a letter to the warring tribe, which later gets codified in the Bible. It can be in the future that, you know, somebody's going to write a book about neuroscience and they're going to cite Sam Harris's episode and maybe even have the whole transcript. And it's going to be, you know, part of a larger text that is in

Starting point is 02:35:05 the battle against so-and-so. So my big call towards this is essentially Nietzschean in nature, which is we are driven to behave in certain ways according to biological imperatives. And whether we call it free will this, free will that, we define it that way. At the end of the day, are we aware of those biological imperatives? And are we aware when we are structuring hierarchies, referring to hierarchies, perhaps kowtowing a little bit to this hierarchy, a little bit less than that? Are we aware of this? And are we aware of the implications of it? And when we're preaching stuff, are we practicing it? Are we even capable of practicing it? Why do you think Jordan Peterson is so popular right now? Because he's obviously the guy who cannot practice what he's preaching,

Starting point is 02:35:49 but he's damn close in some sense, right? And he's just constantly, you know, pointing us to the impossibility of the very thing that we should strive for, knowing that so many chips are stacked against us. Now, whether he's right or wrong, I'm not saying, I'm just saying, look at the popularity of it. Why would that go so, you know, people say, well, it's because you need, we need a father figure, yeah, yeah, yeah, et cetera. Well, why would we need one? Well, it's because we don't have enough will in ourselves to, you know, have a compass, to have something to pattern ourselves after. Because without adopting a frame of reference, without having something to copy, even if it's

Starting point is 02:36:30 a bad copy, then, you know, our free will does nothing for us. Having free will is nothing without a referent. So again, it's just kind of like a, so what? I'm all for people battling and this and that and evidence this and that. It all just still comes down to, if you're right, what changes? And so far, I haven't seen a whole lot changing. And I don't know that it ever will, except for maybe Elon Musk succeeds with Neuralink and that we can all download enlightenment. But are we going to want the consequences of what enlightenment is? And I don't think so. You know, you don't want it forced on you? I don't think so.

Starting point is 02:37:10 What would the consequence of enlightenment be? You'd realize this is a zero-sum game. This is it. So you're going to, you know, buck up or shut up because now's the time to enjoy and it ain't coming back so you know be awake just as it is that's that's what enlightenment is what else would it be meaning say that in another way please so for whatever reason that nobody seems to know, they like to have a lot of opinions about it. They like to say that there's evidence for it.

Starting point is 02:37:52 We're here right now. Yes. We're having this discussion right now. Yeah, hopefully, supposedly. At least I think we are. Whatever. That's the point. What changes if we aren't?

Starting point is 02:38:04 What if this is all illusion what changes nothing there's still death there's still taxes it's still like you know this this meat tube is going to show up and die in a hospital one day or die at home it's going to pay the bills etc like nothing changes whether this is real or not as far as i can tell uh-huh uh-huh okay so this is interesting i see what you're saying okay i can? Because I can pay my taxes with bliss. I would see, okay, now this is an extremely technical argument, and I can't even recapitulate it. It's absolutely, well, it's riveting, but it's tricky. There's something called the free energy principle. I don't know if you've heard it.

Starting point is 02:38:45 It's Carl Friston. I keep mentioning him because I spoke to him earlier today. And Carl Friston says that what we are, what anything, now thing, you can give a technical definition as to what a thing is. What anything is that survives, you can give a technical definition as to what it means to survive, is something that is self-organizing. So now we get into ideas that are similar to life. So self-organizing, and that has beliefs about what's outside of it, and then can act on those beliefs and also takes in sensory information. Now, what's interesting is in his model, which, by the way, if it's to be believed, then it's extremely, extremely general. It's an extremely general argument, which works even if the laws of physics were slightly different.

Starting point is 02:39:32 It works in an extremely abstract sense as to what is a thing. And this is why saying this with words is difficult, because it requires a precise mathematical formulation. And even that is, it's not simple math. It's first, second year math, but it's still not simple. It's not simple math. Okay. He said that. Let's imagine this little guy here. This is a cell. Now, this cell could be a person as well. It could be a society, even whatever. It could be a single cell. It has beliefs about the outside. Then what's interesting is if it has a different belief, it actually changes the world. So when you say, well, what's the difference if so-and-so is the case or is not? Well, what changes is, sure, the world at that instant doesn't change, but the world will then change later.

Starting point is 02:40:28 Your beliefs influence your action. And there's an inextricable link between them. So that's what I would say. And actually, in some way, you co-create the universe. So the universe outside you, this is strange because, well, it's not strange. It's technical in the sense that let's imagine that I'm inside here and I'm in a home right now and there's walls. Now, if this was a living being, then somehow I have to be sensing the outside world and then I have to be acting. So these walls have to be moving and messing around with the world. But what's interesting is in that formalism, the world, you can, there's a duality between the inside and the outside. And that means you can

Starting point is 02:41:11 also view the world as acting on me in an equivalent manner, which means that my beliefs actually change the world. So when someone says, well, what difference does it make if this belief was to be believed or or not well in carl for and i would 100 be that down down that route a month or two months ago but mathematically actually your own beliefs do change the world even right they change the world they change the world that's right they're reflected in the world. They change the world. That's right. They're reflected in the world. So what do we mean by the world, though? What does the world, what does that even mean? Right. Okay, so here's how it's defined. Here's how it's defined. Let's imagine there are, let's imagine we have a checkerboard and there are just dots on the checkerboard. And then let's imagine that you can connect some of the dots, any amount of the dots in any which way.

Starting point is 02:41:59 Okay, so now this looks like a complicated game of checkers with lines in between them. Like a serial killer has lines. Sorry, like the detective has lines trying to find the serial killer with newspapers on the walls and connection between them. And then let's imagine you put arrows and that means this influences this. This influences this. Okay, that's all that's meant by the world. Is that there exists nodes and some can influence one another as to what those are those could be a society influencing a person could be

Starting point is 02:42:32 a person influencing society could be a cell influencing a rock could be a rock it's it's left absolutely general so that's what's meant by the world in this okay well to be charitable to that then we have to say we have to go back to intelligence right so the people who have the most intelligence are doing a real bad job because if they can change the world you know just by thinking a certain way then they are either quite weak right now or they're incredibly strong but they're the battle that they're fighting is stronger, right? So it just comes back to if it's true, what changes? And if it's not true, what changes? But if that kind of thing is true, that thoughts can change the world and so forth,

Starting point is 02:43:20 then we appear to be in a frame, a game that has an 80-20 distribution. And the 20% of the people who are so gifted to even sit there and concentrate on changing the world in a positive way, they're not doing very good, you know, or they're doing all too well, you know, against the forces that they battle with. But I think it's a little bit of a stretch to think that, you know, that is what's happening. And I would personally feel that with the amount of intelligence that I have, whatever you would call that, I don't know how you would, would, uh, sum it up. I'm a failure because damn, if I can change the world just by changing my thoughts, I'm not doing nearly enough, you know? And I can't, I can't see that I've accomplished nearly as much as I should be able to, if that's true. Or, or I can just pat myself on the back and say man there are masters out there who are better than you maybe one day kid maybe one day i see what you're saying i think

Starting point is 02:44:11 that it's just that those kinds of things just circle us back to the same position okay let me see if i understand what you're saying so taking this idea of one's own thoughts can change the world and then stretching that out and saying if i can change the world why can't through a sheer force of will or through a sheer shift of beliefs why can't i drastically improve the conditions of many people on the earth is it something like that spider-man 101 with great power comes great responsibility so buck up cowboy if you can do that let's go like let's see it and the fact of the matter is there are people who are doing

Starting point is 02:44:50 incredible things but are they doing it are they doing it because the proposition that you have laid out i'm not saying that you you yeah yeah you're forwarding it but is it is the impact that they're creating on the world is it because that that proposition is true or is it that they're creating on the world, is it because that proposition is true? Or is it that they're creating impact in the world because of something else that governs, other laws that govern reality? Really, I mean, because if we can figure that out, then maybe some true, you know, what they sometimes call the omega point will happen. Or, you know, the singularity will happen is that from janice i mean this is that from julian barber the omega point or is that from someone else uh well it's uh i think it's from the 19th century a french jesuit priest um but he may have mentioned i haven't read that book yet but um uh he may mention it he may well mention i think dennett mentioned it to the omega point someone mentioned

Starting point is 02:45:43 the omega point and i'm just trying to recall who it was. I know that they weren't the originators of it. But the Omega Point has a negative consequence too because part of that idea was then taught – I think it was Jacques Allure in the Technological Society, which came out in the 70s at some point. He had said, yeah, if that sort of thing happens, then imagine humanity builds a machine, and then that machine figures out how to reproduce its own matter. It would then most likely fill all available matter with itself, pushing out everything else. But that might be what's happening already anyway. I don't know. But that's not, that's certainly not for, you know, the betterment of anything necessarily, just being itselfness totally. But maybe that's what the universe already is, and itselfness trying to be itself totally. But again, those ideas are fun.

Starting point is 02:46:35 I think there's a genre of people, so to speak, who just love playing around with those kind of ideas. But it always comes back to, so what? What can we do with that now? And it's possible. I go back to the ant behavior metaphor. We've got all kinds of helper ants on the planet. We've got some ants that are like super ants, maybe. And maybe all of humanity, maybe, is conspiring to help Elon Musk create Neuralink so that it actually works, so that we don't have to send humans to Mars. We can just send chips into space that encode our consciousness. Maybe that's what humans are doing. But if they're doing it

Starting point is 02:47:09 based on the proposition that you said, I mean, you can read it either way. Damn, there's some powerful thought ninjas out there. Or what took so long? I don't know. But at the end of the day, I don't find it a satisfying proposition at all.

Starting point is 02:47:25 Myself, but I mean. That's okay. That's okay. Let's get to Germany. Let's get to some German language. When we first exchanged some emails, I asked you, there's a professor who speaks, there's actually two who speak German and who give wonderful, wonderful, wonderful physics lectures. And I don't know how to speak German. So I watch their English lectures, but it's not,

Starting point is 02:47:51 but I would love to see the German ones as well. And I thought, well, how can I learn German? And then I, as at that point, I was already exchanging emails with you, and I saw that you're somewhat of a language expert yourself. So I thought, well, why don't I ask Anthony as to how can one go about learning German efficiently, given this is my goal. I don't need to be conversational and go to Germany. I don't care about that. I care about understanding these lectures. Now, I can clearly just go to the YouTube translation and put in the closed captions for english and i have done that but it's boring

Starting point is 02:48:27 because i have to read and then i have to watch i want to see his facial expression is he joking when he says so and so and the translations aren't perfect and it is distracting to read and to try and listen at the same time i thought man it would be wonderful if i could speak german but then i'm and then you told me well here's how you can do it but then i thought man that requires so much more work than at least but you can tell me if i'm wrong but this is what occurred to me i'm like man this is way harder than i thought and i thought it would be as simple as so you can spend two weeks part-time kurt like at the end of a night just an hour a day for two weeks that is 14 hours in total and and learn german to the degree that you want to learn it i don't think that's true and i thought that that i was hoping that would

Starting point is 02:49:10 be the case anyway i think do you think for my goals forget about learning german in general for my goals now that you know what specifically what are, do you think that it's better for me to learn the German that he speaks in that lecture, or should I just swallow the pill of finding it difficult to read the closed captions

Starting point is 02:49:37 at the same time and just read them and go through it? Which one do you think is a better use for my time, given that my goal is simply to understand those lectures in german i think well first i have to say i don't know but i would advise you to learn german as such because at some level that guy is speaking german as such and then if you think of german as having many aspects to it there's there's thedeutsch that he's speaking or German as such, let's call it. And then there's going to be the technical language, which I noticed a lot of those titles are, you know, essentially the German version of terms we would recognize in English anyway, right? Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:50:20 But then there's going to be a lot of nuance that comes from the way German is used in those technical fields. So you then want to spend some time figuring out, you know, how is he using German? How do scholars use German? Because scholastic German is quite nuanced. That's a different type of German? What a language is, is already complicated. And if we're using German as an example, I mean, there is a thing called Hochdeutsch, which is sort of the codified German that they want you to speak, you know, to unify

Starting point is 02:50:56 the country. And whether or not people actually speak it or not, that is the question. Because I learned German in both East Germany or in Berlin and often lived in the east part of Berlin. And I learned it in West Germany in Saarbrücken near the French border, which is quite influenced by French in pronunciation and yada, yada, yada. So there's many Germans to learn. there's many germans to learn so i would i would figure out what city that guy lives in and you know try to um or those guys live in and try to figure out you know can you find examples to work from that may be helpful with their accent and so forth but definitely learn german as such because every technical german that they're learning or they're using um So I'm not sure that there is an actual term

Starting point is 02:51:46 for like Wissenschaft Deutsch, which would be scientific German, but there is going to be in that genre, in that Fach, which is subject, Fachdeutsch, I guess you would maybe call it. I don't know. You can do this with German. Like you could just make stuff up.

Starting point is 02:52:01 Fachdeutsch, yeah. So it must be that somebody has used that term before, but it would be like subject German. So you're going to have like these onion layers. And the more you learn, you know, the more you peer into it. But there's like, he might be from a region that speaks Plattdeutsch or, you know, he might be Berlinerish or something like this. It's like, I don't know.

Starting point is 02:52:19 He could be highly inflected by certain things. His students would know because they know German as such. And they, you know, they would be able to guess. But man, I've been in cities where on one street they say, Ischkalfa, and one block over they say, Ichakuf, which is the same thing. Yeah, I recall you saying that. And for the people listening, Anthony was so kind to me,

Starting point is 02:52:39 so kind that when I just exchanged three emails in total with him, three by the third email, I said, hey, this is by the way, what I'm thinking about learning. He recorded a 15 minute lecture for me essentially on his computer, 15 minutes of his own time. It wasn't quick. It wasn't fast typing keyboard letters. It was actual 15 minute screen recording him speaking to me, speaking to the camera for me to listen to later. I found that to to be so i didn't thank you enough for that so thank you please i didn't i'm sorry if i am curt to use a pun i'm curt over emails well this this is my karma yoga this is how i do the nichian proposition i'm cursed to live every day so why not live it in the way that makes me

Starting point is 02:53:20 feel blissful well i i'm i'm honored and I don't think I'm grateful enough for the fact that you find bliss in helping me or helping others in general. But at least for me, I'm the only one that can feel this right now. So I don't think I'm grateful enough.

Starting point is 02:53:32 And thank you for that. My pleasure. I think it was the Buddha who said that expectation is the quickest path to suffering. So had I expected anything from you, that would have been my failure. But I'm glad that it helped you or it impacted you or impressed you or

Starting point is 02:53:50 whatever it did. But that's the secret. That's the secret of how to memorize German or to learn German using memory techniques. Okay, I'm going to get to now some audience questions. Okay. All right. I don't know if you have this issue but when i ask people for audience questions i i find it so difficult to read their questions i don't know why if it's text from a book it's it's different but if it's audience questions i don't know if if they're not realizing that i'm that it's easier for me to read it verbatim, and that sometimes it doesn't make sense the way that they've written it, or if I'm just processing it differently because it's an audience question, but I have such a difficult time

Starting point is 02:54:33 with reading audience questions. I can read quotations completely fine from a book, but audience questions, I have a difficult time. So sorry, Martin, if I'm not reading your entire question, I'm going to read this. Has improving your memory led you to believing there is no free will? Well, it has changed how I experience reality. That's for sure. But back to what we talked about before. I don't believe things or I try to avoid the idea of believing things because why would I need to believe something that was true?

Starting point is 02:55:01 So it is true that memory has changed how I experience my acts of will in the world. And why? Because I have worked a lot on a particular procedural training, which is when my little mind goes, oh, this sucks, or this is a waste of time, or I hate this damn thing. I just have trained myself. Is this thought useful? And, you know, that has changed everything because i didn't choose to have those thoughts i don't have will in it you know i'm working on annihilating it totally if that's possible i don't know gary weber says it's possible a lot thousands of you know people say in their books that it's possible that you could have complete lasting nirvana here

Starting point is 02:55:41 on earth or whatever nervy kalpa samad Samadhi, I think they call it. So I'm just working on it just to see if it's possible, but I've let go of the outcome. Please give the Cliff Notes version of the TED Talk for the audience, because you mentioned this a couple of times of not finding your thoughts useful or asking that question and how useful that has been. So do you mind giving that, giving a quick recap? Yeah. Well, the long and short of it is I have dealt with mental health issues for a very long time. And some of them involve what is typically called harm OCD. And a lot of it is just really nasty. And I've just suffered with thoughts and self-denigration, blah, blah, blah, like you name it. And it happens still to this day.

Starting point is 02:56:26 I used to take medication for it. And then I stopped. I was doing like a biohacking experiment and started using bulletproof coffee instead of psychiatric medicine. What year was that? That I stopped psychiatric medicine or when I started having a problem? That's your current bulletproof coffee. Oh, that would have been 2015.

Starting point is 02:56:41 Oh, it was fairly recent, huh? that would have been 2015. Oh, it was fairly recent, huh? Yeah. I stopped medication in 2015 and just started doing my own thing to deal with mental health issues. And, uh, it was risky. I did it with Dr. Supervision. This is not advice to anybody, but you know, I did it what I think is the right way with Dr. Supervision. And, uh, also I had a health coach and yeti but anyway just to get back to what the talk is about i started to i had always meditated but it hadn't really created you know these masterful experiences except for i had these weird experiences of like a bit of light in the center of my forehead sometimes and uh i came to brisbane and i met a guy long story but we know each other from the internet.

Starting point is 02:57:25 And we were talking about atheism and we were talking about spirituality. And he has a website called Project Monkey Mind. And he works a lot on helping people with psychiatric issues and et cetera and bringing more mindfulness through journaling. Anyway, we're talking about this stuff. And I said, you know, I'm not going to – he he said have you ever tried chanting or any of that because you can memorize stuff and I said I'm never gonna do that because I just the religious people they're the enemy like I was really at that time this is before we'll be atheism this is before we were it isn't

Starting point is 02:57:58 yeah I was I was I was hook line and sinker with the new atheists kind of stuff you know us versus them kind of crap. And, um, I'm sympathetic to them still, but that's what the way it was. And he just said, he said to me, have you ever heard of Gary Weber? And I was like, no, who the hell is that? And he said, well, he used to be like you. He, he, he actually wanted to find a meditation program to stop his own mental thoughts, the suffering, he had extreme suffering. And somehow he came across the idea of the Sanskrit. He memorized all the Sanskrit, and one day his thoughts went away. And I'm like, what do you mean his thoughts went away? He's like, just gone. And I just said, BS, right? But I pride myself a little bit in being a skeptic, like a true skeptic,

Starting point is 02:58:39 which I go out and investigate. So I read Gary Weber's books, and then I thought, go out and investigate. So I read Gary Weber's books. And then I thought, huh, well, I know memory techniques. I can memorize all of this Sanskrit. I can do it correctly or quickly. And let's see what happens. And lo and behold, you know it. I started to feel way better. And I started to have this tool. And I started to be tortured less and less and less by these thoughts. My wife noticed it. All my friends noticed it. My YouTube audience noticed it. I was just freer, happier, et cetera. And then one day I got really mad at the internet and it was partly related to that Google ad experiment that I was telling you about. I almost threw my laptop out the window and I just said, no, no, I go for a walk.

Starting point is 02:59:25 Anyway, I go and I sit in the park and all of a sudden my thoughts did disappear. And I mean gone. And I was just like, what the hell is this? And that touched me so deeply. And it's like a tuning fork was hit that still is ringing to this day. And I still have thoughts. But, man, it's's paid off. I worry about sounding like a religious nut, but it was, I think it's scientifically explainable.

Starting point is 02:59:52 And as Weber explains it, this is the default mode network that is like, I, I, me, me, me. This is the task positive network, which is more in the moment flow, not too concerned about the future, not too concerned about the past, et cetera, more aware of the present moment. And it makes total sense. So I just have kept practicing. And I'm pretty sure that if you tested it with other people, it doesn't have to be Sanskrit. But I think there is something to the knowledge, because the knowledge in the Sanskrit that I've memorized is just trying to get you to remember, this is it. This moment is it.

Starting point is 03:00:28 So use it wisely. And that thought that you're having, it's like a little child. It's a little boy that's not behaving. So get rid of it. The idea that you are real, it says in the Sanskrit, is as rare as a rabbit with horns, which makes you laugh when you remind yourself of the Sanskrit.

Starting point is 03:00:46 But why has it come to mind? Because of procedural memory training. And that's why I think, and if you read Gary Webber Between the Lines, that's what he's saying. He still has planning thoughts. He still has to, you know, do whatever people have to do

Starting point is 03:00:59 as long as they're a meat tube that are walking the planet, you know. But he's just not tortured. Just not tortured. And I'm not tortured anymore anymore and it's so amazing this was around 2015 well this project in memory started in the breakthrough started in 2017 but i that's interesting i had some help from getting off the medicine and i also quit drinking because i was a, I was a lush. I mean, I lived in Germany. How about psychedelics or even weed? Oh, marijuana.

Starting point is 03:01:32 Yeah. I, I, um, I spent a lot of time with those things. Unfortunately, I started with it too young. I, uh, when I was 14, I had a really bad experience, um, which was really good in its way as well. I think it had the impact that a lot of people talk about. I've never done ayahuasca, but I think it had a similar impact. Basically, what happened is I dropped a double dose at lunch hour in grade nine. Okay. And double dip blue moon, it was called.

Starting point is 03:02:03 At school? Yeah. I was fine. I had to leave school because it was getting too intense quite quickly but uh by about 9 p.m i i thought i had peaked and was done and i went and saw some friends and they were smoking something to this day i don't know what it is but uh it was it was laced maybe with pcP but I just took the can and I huffed like you wouldn't believe and let me tell you on top of the double dip yeah that acid was not over

Starting point is 03:02:31 I mean my friends later told me or I heard somewhere that there's a thing a phenomenon called roller coaster acid which is you can feel like you're peaked and back to normal but you haven't peaked yet so anyway

Starting point is 03:02:43 somewhere that night I peaked but man I lived in somewhere that night I peaked, but man, I, I, I lived in eternity that night. And, uh, let's just say I was lucky that I had some people who helped me read, uh, Carlos Castaneda, for example, um, who also had some pretty intense drug experiences that helped me contextualize it a little bit. And from there I got into, you know, Herman Hesse and Camus and stuff. So I had tools to help me, but I was destroyed. I had anxiety for, uh, I was around age 14. I had really bad anxiety until I was about 37 or so. Um, that's, that's, that's so strange because, well, I guess if you're 14, that's completely

Starting point is 03:03:22 different for people who are adults, psychedelics are salubrious. They actually help. Oh, believe me, before that experience, I had lots of fun experiences with LSD. But we used to live beside a guy who was a UBC chem major, and he would bring home lots that he had created in the lab. And he'd say, have a try of this and tell me what you should call it. At least you know it's pure. Well, yeah, that's what he said but yeah um we would name it for him oh yeah let's call this electric dragon and uh yada yada and

Starting point is 03:03:51 that guy you know true he's good he's like he's not in jail but i never i never told until uh until now i mean i've told a few people over the years but i don't remember his name or who he was but what a moron giving that to teenagers as an aside speaking of unscrupulous people in the educational field there was this teacher that i had maybe i'll tell the story another time but i'll give you a quick version of it there's this teacher i had who this was back when you could burn cds and video games and so on now you can just download them right okay so this is 2004 or so and he would i hated the class that i was in i hated it was plenty of memorization that i didn't care about maybe if i had taken your lessons i would i would have i would have found it to be a fun exercise but i saw it as a as an imposition anyway he said okay well why don't

Starting point is 03:04:46 you first why don't you burn me some games that i'll give you grades so first of all burning burning cds at all is illegal and then second he's like i'll just give you good grades for it anyway okay well i'm well i'm fortunate to have him as a teacher. Teachers are humans too, right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Let's get to another question. Sure. Sure. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:05:08 Okay. Someone wants to know, who are your favorite authors to read in German? Now that brings me back to that Gary Weber. I don't know if he's German or not, but what one book, if people from this were to take away just one book of his, which one would you say is the most helpful? Oh, I don't think it's one, but happiness beyond thought and evolving beyond thought. Those two kind of, they kind of go together. But if you had to pick one, just roll the dice. I mean, I don't know. Yeah. Each one is fine. And which order, if you could pick both, which one would you read first? Well, in my experience,

Starting point is 03:05:41 and this is what Gary Weber points out in happiness beyond thought, don't try to reproduce the journey of somebody else. It's not going to happen. So it's like irrelevant which order you read them. Or I can't predict. But I read Happiness Beyond Thought first. I started getting some great results out of it. But it was really memorizing the script in Evolving Beyond Thought where the game started to change. started to change. And that script is select selections from the Ribhu Gita. And I mean, if you want to talk about Uber atheism, there it is. I mean, it's, it's the implications of that sort of prove the proposition of Uber atheism that I'm saying I've had, I personally have arrived at from looking into Sanskrit. After that, I went back and memorized the Sanskrit in Happiness Beyond Thought, which is from a text called the Upadeza Sharam. And there's some extracts there from Bhagavad Gita. In any case, look, just if you're interested in that kind of stuff, give it a try. Keep an open mind, but not so open that your mind falls out. And I found it incredibly useful. I think I've got good reasons why that it's useful. But the point is, don't try to

Starting point is 03:06:52 reproduce the teacher and have a goal. I had a goal. I wanted to stop this nonsense chatter or at least reduce its negative impact in my life. And it's worked so well but i also did the dietary stuff i got rid of alcohol i haven't had alcohol or drugs for many years now and i feel like almost every year i get cleaner and cleaner because i drank a lot um so i wouldn't pin it all on memorizing some sanskrit even though it i think i see i see the knowledge of it has been huge for dealing with thoughts because it says in the Atma Bodha, constant practice neutralizes ignorance as a base, neutralizes an acid, purifying the individual self. So basically practicing what knowledge? Well, the knowledge that now is the only moment. What other knowledge could be more impactful?

Starting point is 03:07:41 I don't know. But constantly practicing it is really great. In terms of German authors, or German books, I mean, Patrick Suskind, I was very lucky to read German well enough that I eventually got to read that Kurt Cobain suggestion from when I was a teenager in German. Absolutely amazing book. There's a book called Dating Berlin that I really like, which is written by an ex-prostitute who had immigrated to Berlin from Italy. And I really like that book a lot. I don't know if we can swear on your channel, but it's part two of another book that has an English swear word in it.

Starting point is 03:08:15 So I will allow people to search that. I personally don't care about the swearing. It's more about foolish worry of the demonetization. You know, I even wanted to look up or inquire into COVID and the vaccine because from what I'm hearing, I'm hearing plenty of different pieces of information. So I thought, why can't I just speak to an expert who is pro-COVID vaccine and then anti-COVID vaccine, have him on this channel and have him duke it out or have me be a mediator between them. And it turns out as you search for

Starting point is 03:08:51 information as to why the vaccine is ineffective, so you can find plenty of information as to vaccine is what you should take. But as soon as you do search the opposite, then you don't get much information. You only get about how anti-vaxxers are obscene idiots. And even on Google. And it seems like if you try to talk about that the vaccine may not be the way to go or there are more criteria, it's not as simple as people think. It seems like you get demonetized. And it drains me so much, Anthony, to think that I can't even explore this. I want to know for myself.

Starting point is 03:09:26 I want to know. I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm not a pro-vax. I don't know, man. I don't know. I want to know. Why can't I get people on my program to speak about it without having to worry that my day job, which is this, the money that comes in, will be dried up? And it upsets me. i'm deeply concerned about this and

Starting point is 03:09:47 i'll tell you why in the year 1600 a guy named bruno giordano bruno was burned at the stake he was a memory heresy he was a memory wizard he's the guy that we get a lot of these techniques from he memorized and created memory systems that are so powerful and so profound. And he was burnt at the stake because he said, hey, you know what? There's an infinity out there. And quite possibly there are not only infinite planets, but infinite gods on those planets, you know, and that was too much. And they killed him. And as a memory person, I think that example of him being burned at that stake for just saying what he thought is very timely or should

Starting point is 03:10:31 be more on our minds and I made a video myself about that when Coppa came out and I said I said I don't want to direct address this issue directly right because this issue just keeps on coming and coming Tipper Gore when I was a, put parental advisory stickers on everything. You couldn't buy a heavy metal album without being told that it was, you know, dangerous or whatever, right? So this issue that's happening now is not new. It seems to come in waves and so forth. But the consequences of it should never have to happen again, that people are being burned at the stake. And they are right now. It's just that there's no fire and there's no pillory, but there's a symbol.

Starting point is 03:11:11 I keep using this term symbolic behavior because I think it's really important to start seeing that this tribalness, it goes beyond virtue signaling. It's much deeper than that. It's much more nuanced. It goes beyond virtue signaling. It's much deeper than that. It's much more nuanced. There is something that we could potentially solve about it, but I don't know how. And the implications of machines reading everything that we're doing all the time and making decisions on it in real time is not what I would have hoped for the Internet. I mean, it should be the opposite uh in some yeah yeah it is it doesn't it's not pleasant to think about and there's a guy named jonathan pageau who has a wonderful

Starting point is 03:11:53 channel called the symbolic world that you might like if you haven't heard of him already yeah okay so so john so okay i was going to recommend and recommend that there's something else that reddit apparently is toying with not sure if this is true or not. Not sure. But apparently they're toying with, they can ban your account, yes, for whatever reason. Like, let's say they think you're a white supremacist, they'll ban you. But also, they're thinking of banning you if you've upvoted other people who have been banned. Now, that to me is another step and then it makes you think

Starting point is 03:12:27 well man what the heck am i supposed i know for my film better left than said i was called a white supremacist even though i'm brown and even though i don't even though i admonish white supremacists in the film it doesn't matter because i am apparently going against the extreme left. And then because you're doing that, then what you are must be the exact opposite, which is a fascist and so on. And hopefully you see that I'm not. Or I hope that the people who are watching me for any more than five minutes long can detect that. Well, it doesn't take it takes more than five minutes, but you understand. And it's it makes me wonder, well, what if I upvote some comments about free speech?

Starting point is 03:13:09 And then later on talking about free speech becomes a dog whistle, quote unquote, for fascism. Then am I a fascist by association to Reddit? And then how far does that go? That's a, that's tricky. That's a, that's a treacherous situation. Well, you know, I don't know where it's going to go, and I don't think anybody does, but we're already seeing... There was already two internets anyway, like with the dark web and so forth.

Starting point is 03:13:36 And so we're just going to end up seeing multiple internets, I think. I mean, the implications of it are that it's just going to be more tribal, not less. And I think Tim Berners-Lee now has this new idea that it's going to be more tribal, not less. And I think Tim Berners-Lee now has this new idea that it's going to be a new internet called Solid, which would hopefully solve some of these problems. Because at the core of this, I think, it seems pretty obvious to me, but I could be wrong, is corporate interest. And corporate interest is no way to run the intellectual promise of the internet to corral search to behave in a particular way. But then you think, well, were libraries better?

Starting point is 03:14:13 And no, because libraries had even more corralling of what was going to be in those shelves and what wasn't going to be in them. So we end up with multiple internets, so be it. But it's not going to be the great promise of the oneness that the internet provided of this seamless fluidity between my question and your answer, you know. And that's tremendously sad to lose when if we're going to talk about the omega point and all that sort of stuff. We had singularity with an open internet that wasn't filled with gatekeepers, but who knows? But there's other ways to have quote-unquote internets, and we'll probably look at a future of an infinity of them,

Starting point is 03:14:54 but I don't think it's going to have the Gutenberg press impact that this one had and could potentially have even more. I hope to speak to Tim Berners-Lee. I emailed him. I would love to get him on this channel to talk about the direction of the new internet oh well okay let's see what some people say they say that i am living in the set of 2001 spade os space odyssey someone said nice the background that's that's that's the very good observation okay then let's see someone says as we're talking about how 2000 or whatever that's what that's what comes up right maybe there is a guiding consciousness that was a

Starting point is 03:15:35 that was a little too on point that reference to come up right then Scentless Apprentice is that the name of the book? No It's called Perfume Nirvana song It's Das Parfum in German by Patrick Susskind Grunewi I think is the name of the hero or the anti-hero

Starting point is 03:16:04 better said. Okay, I'm not going to take questions from the live chat because it doesn't seem like there are any that I can discern right now, so I'll take the ones from before, the audience questions. Many of these, I wrongly positioned you as someone who aids in the memory of mathematicians, many of these are sorry about that so many of these are questions related to math we can uh we can talk about that yeah formulas memorizing formulas is not that difficult if you develop the systems to do it someone says do drugs enhance cognitive performance and if so like which that's steve agnew uh well steve i mean that's neurotropics and all that sort of stuff is is an interesting topic my position would be do your research and consult a doctor etc but if you want to improve your memory as such and improve your cognition

Starting point is 03:17:00 as such do it for the long term and invest in getting some memory skills that enable you to do it without drugs. Because, you know, in my world, in my memory training world, I tell people always be like the samurai prepared to execute any last move, even with your head cut off. Because if you don't have your pills, what's the use of all your cognitive enhancement based on pills? As opposed to, you know, when I showed up at that memory competition that we've mentioned, I was hungover. I had a bad day with my arthritis. I have psoriatic arthritis. I was jet lagged. And I still did half as well as a guy who has two Guinness world records. And I'd never competed in a memory competition. Well, congratulations. So, you know, that's what I have to say to

Starting point is 03:17:42 neurotropics for cognitive performance. Ragesh or Rajesh wants to know, how can I improve my short-term memory or working memory? Any routines, any games? Yeah, I would build your own games. And I would consider you to consider, or I would ask you to consider memory as more holistic than short-term working memory. Go for all the levels of memory. So exercise your autobiographical, your semantic, your procedural, your figural, episodic, et cetera. And the best way to get that holistic comprehensive training is to build a memory palace and memorize some stuff

Starting point is 03:18:17 using elaborative encoding, using what I call recall rehearsal, and doing it about four times a week at least for the next 90 days, and you will be amazed by what happens. Have you heard of Thomas Aquinas' Art of Memory? Yes. Well, I don't know that he has a text of that, but I do know his memory writings. And one of the things he says in there is that memory favors organization, and he gives some specific steps about how to optimize how you organize memory palaces and it's very

Starting point is 03:18:48 good okay someone wants to know is addiction related to memory possibly there's certainly going to be a procedural memory component where you know you get quite addicted to going through certain rituals and habits. But I don't know enough about addiction to really comment. I know that I have sometimes had addiction to go to the gym, for example, but that's a very positive addiction. So I'm not really a, but why is it a positive addiction? Like somehow you get this urge to do it. Same, I've developed an urge to practice memory or an urge to meditate.

Starting point is 03:19:27 I don't know enough about it, but I'm sure that it's procedural memory is related at some level. And also external cues, like you can build external cues that help you remember. Memory is not always inside your head. It can also be in the heads of others and in the world. How long has Anthony been practicing his memory techniques? That's from trollop seven and the previous question about i just want to make sure i get people's names and the previous question about is addiction related to memory that is from mystery bear okay so thank you for

Starting point is 03:19:58 that mystery bear trollop um the how long have you been practicing your memory techniques? Yeah, the answer is 2003 is when I started, and I started very seriously, and I haven't really started. I haven't taken any significant long pauses since 2003. There are a couple more questions, but I'm going to have to end it there, man. Thank you so much for being such a trooper and staying with me for maybe three and a half hours so far.

Starting point is 03:20:30 Oh, I really appreciate the opportunity to jam and had a blast. I love what you're doing, and I really look forward to more great stuff on your channel. Thank you, man. Do you have a favorite of all the podcasts? Just so I know I'm always interested in the different guests of what they like and what they don't like. Yeah, well, I like the Richard Heyer one. I like that you recently did your own first AMA. That was great. Yeah, I mean, I just I like the project overall. I think it has a focus that's kind of rare on the internet and you managed to

Starting point is 03:21:05 have a variety that is still sort of focused on a, on a good trajectory. So really amazing. Thank you, man. Well, I know what I know a little bit about the hard work that goes into it. So, you know, I, I admire that. I know something from experience of what, what goes into it and then having that sort of ability to balance focus and variety is very challenging so thank you I appreciate it this is a great time for me to mention for people who want to see more conversations like this that

Starting point is 03:21:37 I do have a patreon it's patreon.com slash Kurt J. Mungle and it doesn't seem like it but each dollar helps every single patient, sorry, patient, patron. Every single patron helps. That's not a parapraxis. Every single one helps. And I even tell my wife, like I'm being honest,

Starting point is 03:21:55 each one, I'm like, babe, babe, look at this. There's someone, there's a patron. She's like, oh my gosh, babe. Even if it's a dollar, but either way, thank you so much to the people who do donate. And Anthony, what do you have to plug? I plug your stuff. I mean, if you're not

Starting point is 03:22:12 supporting or whatever, I mean, there's many ways to support sharing stuff, getting involved in the comments, training the robots to care about this. I would just double down on whatever you can do and see the many ways that you can contribute. I think one of the biggest problems that we have is that, I mean, maybe it's an 80-20 rule that governs the universe, but most of the people who are benefiting the most seem to be contributing the least. And then you have like this core 20% who just contribute because it's nothing to them, right. And it almost, it would almost be nice to see that switch somehow where the people would really get that,

Starting point is 03:22:55 that every penny really does count, especially when you have all these forces against you. So, you know, it helps emotionally. You can Google me. I'm not here to pitch, but, uh, yeah, please, please plug yourself and galactic MMA or Galactus MMA says the hair looks great. That's why I asked. Put a smiley face. Okay. Oh, well, thank you. Well, I assume that person doesn't want you to think that he was being sarcastic.

Starting point is 03:23:17 No, I was. So Anthony, what do you have to promote? Where can the audience find out more about you? I promote memory as such. So if you're interested in improving your memory, just search memory. You can search in memory and Anthony, I'm sure I come up, but my website is magnetic memory method.com. And I have a YouTube channel and, uh, yeah, I would just encourage people to really think deeply about your memory and see that probably some memory fitness is going to contribute more to your life than you can imagine. It's not the magic bullet that cures

Starting point is 03:23:50 everything, but your consciousness, I think, is produced in large part in collaboration with your memory. So if you want to jam on those topics, then magneticmemorymethod.com is my headquarters on the internet. Thank you so so much i do have a personal another plug i've been told i need to mention this more we have itunes we have spotify we have google play and sorry google podcast for this podcast and i only talk about the youtube channel but if ever you're listening or you want to listen on those platforms, please do leave a review because it helps. And Making Senses says that he left Patreon. He uses PayPal to donate. I do also have a PayPal on the YouTube.

Starting point is 03:24:31 I don't know what it's called, the Bouter community page. You'll see it. Okay, Anthony, because I don't want it to just be about me, what else? Could you promote one more item just to make it even?

Starting point is 03:24:41 Well, I really appreciate that people have been finding my TEDx talk i don't necessarily know why that it sort of shot up but i i guess i would my ego would like to see it shoot up even more because i see it helping so many people uh and it will be in the description the book version of that tedx is called the victorious mind how to How to Master Memory, Meditation, and Mental Well-Being. And yeah, if you want to read that, that's great. But I'm happy to, if anybody wants that, they can't afford it, I can give them a copy of that that are watching this or listening to this or whatever.

Starting point is 03:25:15 Just get in touch because the stakes are high. Memory really helped me not annihilate myself at the end of the day. And I'm glad that I didn't, even if I'm not, you know, so convinced that there's any reason that anything is existing and that there's no purpose behind anything, et cetera. But in terms of coping with the world, it's been the biggest thing for me to be able to use memory, to refine my ability to be in the moment and deal with whatever comes. And so

Starting point is 03:25:45 I'm pretty devoted to helping others who want to do the same. And so, yeah, it helps me. Every penny helps if you buy that book, of course, and it tells Amazon to show it to more people. But if you can't, for whatever reason, reach out and I will get you a copy. I recommend it. I started reading it today in preparation for this, and I thought I could finish it in about 30 minutes. I wasn't able to, and I definitely wouldn't have been able to retain it, but I recommend it from what I've read so far. Thank you, Anthony. I hope to see you again, and thank you for being so generous with your time. Thank you for having me. It was a great pleasure.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Anthony Metivier on Uber Atheism, Consciousness, Increasing Memory, Understanding Žižek, and Depression

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.